


1001 tales

by therewasagirl



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: AU, F/F, F/M, Tags and ships to be added, collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-08-12 11:26:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7932856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therewasagirl/pseuds/therewasagirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of random AU-s and little one-shots that i might indulge in every now and then.<br/>newest chapter: Olicity Matrix Au</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Princess of a Thousand Years

There are legends of warrior princess in many cultures. Women that is said started revolutions or ended them, brought their people together into new ages or destroyed them. 

The most famous among these stories is the tale of the Princess of A Thousand Years. She was born of the sun and the moon, they say, because she was of such beauty and such fierceness that her people believed only one blessed by both could shine so brightly. She was her father-s only daughter, and her mother-s only heir - so she was forged as the mistress of the arts of war and she brought her people together into one united nation, fought off many enemies and never once saw defeat in battle. Tales of her began to spread, as a woman who could be defeated by no living man.

But great victories make great enemies, and one such enemy was so embittered by his defeat that when he could not win by earthly means, he chose the otherworldly ones. If no man could defeat this, then he would seek other means, for he was beyond nothing to achieve his own ends. He sought a witch - a woman of the deep woods of the Dragonteeth mountains, a place so lost that only the lost dared venture there. His men fell one after the other, until he was alone. Spite refused to let him die, his thirst for vengeance was so great - almost as great as the sting of his pride. He found the with in the end, and where he expected crooked back and white hair and ugliness, he found a village of working women with hair long to the backs of their knees, dressed in bright colors, rough hands and suspicious eyes. 

None of them would speak to him, even when he laid the diamonds before them as payment, even when he promised great recompense. None but one. An old lady, skin as brittle as paper, age writ into her skin in little cobwebs of laugh lines. She was the only the only clad in bright yellow cloak, wrapping around her like a lovers embrace. She came forward and looked into his eyes with her own milky ones. Looked into his soul… and smiled. And the man wished she never had for the look of her then was one so terrible it reminded him to be afraid. It reminded him on whose doorstep he had come. 

‘I have long seen your coming.’ she said then, softly, a thousand years in the roughness of her voice. She looked down her crooked nose at him, and he would have struck her for her pride, had he not needed her sorcery. 

‘I will not give call forth Death at your bidding, _man_ , for those whose time has not yet come.’ She told him then, softly. ‘But I shall give you something else.’ she turned away from him. Her next words were not for him. ‘The red strings of fate bid me to.’ 

She called her sisters and sat all night around a small fire, mumbling in their forgotten language. ‘when the world is unmade and remade again. when the moon changes a thousand times and then one. when the sun and the moon meet and kiss in the sky. when mountains blow in the wind like leaves, and not before. then you shall awake’ 

Once the chanting was done and the fire had died, she gathered its ashes, put them in a pouch and tied its leather strings tight, handed it to the man. 

‘All will be settled.’ were her parting words.  

Leagues away from them, the Princess did no wake when the first rays of her mother the sun caressed her face. She did not wake hours after, not when her ladies came nor when they started screaming. Not for their pleas nor for their tears either. She would not wake from her otherworldly sleep, not for a thousand years. 

The man had his revenge. And he’d thought he won when he invaded her kingdom and sat on her throne, but he forgot the old witches words. All will be settled. 

Time passed. The man died and so did generations more. The princesses bloodline spread into the world and into the mountains, making them their secret home. The world changed and then changed again and through the shift of time, truth became legend, legend became myth. And some things that should not have been forgotten, were lost. 

Until a young archaeologist in training got separated from her man group as she explored an ancient tomb in the mountains of the Hindu Kush. She was dizzy because of the height and lost herself following old inscriptions in the walls. One moment the ground beneath her feet was sure, the other it was gone and she fell. 

She landed hard after a rough tumble, but she was lucky. Barely any debris fell with her, leaving her with just a few scraps and lots of dirt and cobwebs. She was irritatingly mumbling to herself ‘Just perfect, Lance. _Outstanding_.’ worrying as she brushed off her face and clothes, if she was going to be send home for being so careless. She was too annoyed to truly look at where she was just yet… until she did. And then she was breathless for one whole other reason. 

The light from her  torch bent and broke into a thousand beams, because beyond the walls from which she fell through, there was an archway of glass, and beyond it still more of it, a whole room unlike any she had ever seen. ( _no tomb for the beloved princess of eons past, nothing so grim as that. none had dared. she breathed, blood flushed her cheeks. she slept, her rest peaceful. they had thought it a great sin to cover her with earth and stone, where the sun and moon would never find her again_ ) 

‘This temple used to be above ground’ her professor will tell Sara later, still half dazed from the discovery. ‘there must have been a flood or a falling of earth…or something… something. it was supposed to be a legend. nobody believed it existed’ 

But it did. And so was the woman resting within it. 

Sara walks forward, her hand shaking a little but her eyes wide as if they cant take enough of the room in. She feels like she-s walking into the heart of a diamond. There are inscriptions into the walls, whole stories that she is too dazed to read, and all the other decorations are made of glass of pale-as-mild marble. There are a thousand years of history in this room, she thinks as she looks up. The ceiling is so high she cannot see it with only one torch. 

She’s breathless when she reaches the middle, where the last resting place of whoever this was built for is supposed to be. The tomb is made of glass too. Sara passes a hand over it to wipe away the thick layer of dust. Through the panel she can see faded red fabric and a glitter of gold. 

She might have spent hours lost in that room, looking around and making a catalog of all the things in it, if the echoes of her team’s voices hadn’t reached her. She turns and, without thinking, calls back for them as loud as she can.

‘ _I’m in here_!’ 

She shakes when her voice slams against the multiple walls of glass and comes back at her a thousand times stronger than before, unnatural. She winces, then screams, covers her ears and curls into herself and when she hears the first cracks of the glass shattering she things ‘Oh god this is it I-m gonna die.’

But the shatter ends, and she’s still breathing. So she dares to open her eyes, her mind frozen on ‘what the fuck is my life’ on repeat as she looks around. And then everything stops.

Because where the tomb used to be, now there are only shards of glass, and where the dry corpse of whoever was in it was supposed to be, there is the body of a girl, who doesn’t look at all like she was entombed a thousand years ago. Sara is truly afraid this time, stuck between terror and shock, and thoughts of -what the fuck happened in here’. She wonders now if she really is the first to find this room, and if something much more atrocious happened here much more recently and someone thought to hide the body of a girl in here, where nobody would find it. It’s the spark of anger that that thought provokes that makes her move closer. Her limbs are heavy and her mind slow, and it’s some horror movie shit when she holds her own breath, surreally waiting for the dead girl in the corner to take a breath, so alive she looks.

‘Who did this to you…” she’s thinking, moved beyond words and almost to tears, wondering who would ever be that kind of monster. Her next thought it ‘You were so beautiful.’

She almost faints when the girl draws a shallow breath and opens her eyes. 

And that’s how the story begins. 

 


	2. Inception

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> olicity 'Inception' au

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have no idea how i managed to write almost 7000 words of something that is ultimately boring, because i realized by the end that this is just like the movie and adds nothing to it but a change of names... Yeah, whatever.  
> Enjoy (hopefully)

The waves carry and toss her onto the wet said, the retreating tide pulling her backwards, until the incoming one breaks on her back and shoves her further still on the shore. Her mouth burns, her eyes are bloodshot from the salt, her skin scorched. Her short hair is plastered to her face, dark roots grown five inches, contrasting with the blonde lengths.  And she’s so cold she might have forgotten entirely what warmth was like before this, but she does not have the strength to even crawl away from the water.

A child’s joyful shout pierces the ringing in her ears and, as if the sound was the sting of her life, she looks up, eyes red and desperate. Further up the shore, a little girl in a pink dress is playing on the sand, building a castle, her sandy hair looking like a gold halo around her head. She’s not sure of the little girl is real of if the sheer strength of wanting to see her has brought her to life.

She groans, wanting, needing to call out to her, make her turn, see her sweet face. But her throat is dry and she cannot make a sound. The little girl runs away, her bell-like laughter fading, ringing in her ears. That last bit of hope keeping her awake fades.

The world goes dark.  

She doesn’t feel the barrel of a rifle poking her side, lifting her jacket to expose the gun tucked in her waistband at the small of her back. She doesn’t feel it when rough hands roll her onto her back nor hear the men speaking to each other in Chinese before they drag her away from the shore.

They shove her in the back of a jeep, and drive. Beyond the sharp rocks and rough-sanded beach, a Chinese castle of dark stone and wood rises from the cliffs as if it has been carved out of them, one level at a time.

-

The dining room is wide and square, the only furniture in it one long table in the middle, and the low-backed chairs around it. The smooth wooden floor reflects the warm golden light from the countless lanterns fixed upon the ceiling, and brings forth the beauty of the painted paper-panels separating the room from the other parts of the castle, without the harsh glare of too much brightness compromising their elegance.

The security guard that found the intruder on the shore waits dutifully as the main attendant speaks with their Lady, seated at the head of the table. He can see but the back of her black Chang'ao, and her carefully coifed white hair. Even so, he lowers his gaze.

“She was delirious.” The attendant says, voice low not to disturb her lady, who dislikes loud voices. “But she asked for you by name. And…”

The attendant turns to the security guard and nods. The man steps forward, bows.

“She was carrying nothing this.” He says as he sets the handgun he found on the intruder on the table. His lady seems more interested in her food than the weapon. “And this.”

He sets the small fixed-blade arrowhead on the table also and for the first time, the lady reacts. The hand reaching for her glass of wine stops and she looks over at the dull-edged thing. It is small - smaller even than half his pinkie. By no means a weapon. A token, perhaps.

The lady’s reaches for the arrowhead. Her hand is now wrinkled with old age, but her fingers are long and elegant when she picks it up and brings it closer to her eyes to observe it. This time it’s not age that makes her hand shake.

She puts the arrowhead down, looks in front of her at the empty spot at the other head of the table.

“Bring her here. And some food.”

-

The intruder is half carried, half walks in the room. she is seated in front of the lady of the house and when the food comes before her, she wolfs is down as if she’s been starved for countless time.

She looks like the ruins of a shipwrecks, the Lady thinks as she watches her uninvited guest carefully.  

She looks like a memory.

The Lady slides the handgun on the table towards her guest.

“Are you here to kill me?” she asks, exactly as unperturbed by the idea as she sounds. Her guest glances at her with bloodshot eyes at that, but says nothing, choosing to get back to her food instead.

The lady picks up the arrowhead next, turns it in her fingers.

“I know what _this_ is.” She says then. She holds it between her thumb and forefinger, balancing the tip of the arrowhead on the table. She spins it, and the arrowhead circles gracefully across the polished cherry-wood surface.

“I’ve seen one of those before. Many, many years ago.” She says, half a murmur as if speaking to herself, her eyes locked on the spinning arrowhead as if enchanted by it.

“It belonged to a woman I met… in a half-remembered dream.”

The arrowhead keeps spinning, not seeming to slow down its momentum. Slowly, the lady looks up waiting for her worse for wear guest to do the same.

“A woman possessed by some… radical notions.”

Across the table, dark brown eyes watered with age meet with equally dark blue ones, framed by a fierce frown. The two women look at each other across the room as if they were looking across time, and between them, history opens up. And memory.

They’d met for the first time many years ago, the Lady thinks. Or perhaps they never did and the memory is as faded as the drab grey sky outside. Never-changing.

Or perhaps it was just yesterday.

-

It was in the same dining room they met, many years ago when Shado was young and the woman in front of her better kept. They spoke over dinner and wine, and of a notion that sounded as if it had come from the pages of a work of fiction.

“What do _you_ think is the most resilient parasite?” Felicity Smoak asks as she pushes a piece of her flawlessly wavy hair behind one ear. She is lovely enough, but not beautiful in the expected way. She is remarkable on the eye in a way that is immediately apparent, but not as easily understood. Felicity Smoak’s fascination, Shado has concluded, is in the details.

In the angular silhouette her dark dress cuts, her carefully filed nails and the bright red toes peaking from her shoes. In her deep pink lips and how it all looks like it belongs.

“A bacteria? A Virus?”

Shado carefully forks some salmon, utterly unperturbed.

“An intestinal worm?”

The amusement is just there in the blonde’s tone and when Shado raises one unimpressed eyebrow at the other woman, Felicity Smoak grins.

John Diggle, who looks like he should be a security guard and not a businessman, cleans his throat and tries to save the situation.

“What miss Smoak means…”

“An idea.” Felicity Smoak offers, knowing now that she has her clients attention. “Ideas are the most resilient and contagious thing on this planet. Once an idea takes hold, it’s _impossible_ to eradicate.”

Shado tilts her head, heavy curtain of hair sliding over the silk of her sleeve and falling over one shoulder.

“Forgetting seems to be a common enough solution.” She offers.

But Felicity Smoak dismisses it with a shake of her head.

“Information can be forgotten. But an _idea_ that is fully formed, fully understood – that sticks.” Miss Smoak taps her forehead gently with one black-tipped finger. “Right in there somewhere.”

Shado brings her forked salmon back to her lips. “For someone like you to steal?”

“Yes.” John Diggle answers. “In the dream state, conscious defenses are lowered and your thoughts become vulnerable to theft. It's called extraction.”

“And you can teach me how to protect myself from this.” It’s not a question. Shado knows what they have come here for, but she is as skeptical now as she was when she was first asked for this appointment.

But she is also curious.

“Yes, we can.” Felicity Smoak says, looking at John Diggle and then back at Shado. It’s not permission, she notes. It’s something else. “We can train your subconscious to defend itself. Militarize it to fight back against even the most skilled extractor.”

 _Militarize it_ … strange choice of word, Shado thinks. A deliberate one. Felicity Smoak does not seem as someone very deliberate, despite the tailored dress she is wearing and the careful make up. But the same cannot be said for John Diggle, whose very presence is calming. A strange thing, for such big a man.

Even through such short a time as a single meal with them, Shado has come to understand that what one lacks, the other supplies. That they act as a team.

The observation satisfies her.

“And how do you propose to succeed in doing that, Miss Smoak?”

The blonde’s eyebrows twitch a bit upwards. “Because I am the most skilled extractor.”

A statement. No ego, no arrogance, just fact.

“I know the tricks and I can teach them to you, so that even when you are asleep you guard is never down.”

“Sounds like a bargain.”

“It has a few… problematic aspects.” John Diggle reminds her.

Felicity Smoak leans forward, her eyes holding Shado’s without blinking.

“To be able to help you I will need to know my way around your thoughts better than anyone. Your partner, analyst, anyone.” Her hands around, to the room they are in. “If this was a dream and you had a safe full of secrets in here, I’d need to know about and know what’s in it. For this kind of strategy to work, you would have to let me in.”

Shado’s eyes flicker on the northern wall before she allows herself a small, knowing smile. She sets the cutlery down and dabs her lips. Rises smoothly from the chair.

Both John Diggle and Felicity Smoak do the same.

“I will consider your proposal Miss Smoak, Mister Diggle. In the meantime, enjoy you evening.”

She turns to leave and one attendant slides the double doors open for her, which give way to the lavish party beyond.

The doors close softly after Shado Fei, and in the silence of the dining room, Felicity and Digg look at each other. Worry makes Jon frown.

A small tremor shakes the walls and the lanterns above them on the ceiling. John’s lips purse even tighter.

“What’s going on up there?” he murmurs, looking at the ceiling as if that will somehow help him see through it, to up above.

Up above - where Felicity, in jeans and a pink cotton blouse is asleep in the middle of the day, on a chair at the end of a steaming bath. Her chin is resting on her chest and messy bob of hair falling forward on her face. The chair is propped on a cabinet, and the bottom legs level with the rim of the bathtub. Sebastian Blood is sweating in the tropical heat, watching over her. He checks the watch on Felicity’s left wrist, making sure not to disturb the two thin yellow tubes held in place with a tape.

The seconds crawl unnaturally slow, but it’s exactly what Blood expected.

A distant explosion rumbles through the rundown apartment. Blood checks through the window the riot on the streets below.

Sebastian follows the tubes to the silver briefcase at John’s feet, who chose to fall asleep on the armchair. Another set of tubes from the briefcase go all the way under the door of the bedroom, where Shado Fei has been put to sleep on the bed. Sebastian checks her pulse, makes sure the tubes are still connected.

A more powerful explosion ripples through the room – and even further up, in a train compartment with the first rays of dark barely peaking on the horizon, Sebastian is asleep, his head rocking against the glass window as the train bumps over a rough pieces of track.

The young man sitting in front of Sebastian looks at him nervously, the manga he’d been pretending to read forgotten on his lap as he checks Sebastian’s pulse, where two yellow tubes disappear beneath his sleeve. The other two men and the blonde woman are also asleep. Todashi checks his watch, whose hands move in real time. As another train passes in the opposite direction  with a mighty whoosh, the cabin lurches. Todashi’s eyes fly to Sebastian’s sleeping face, who jerks with the movement of the train.

Below, in the filthy bathroom of the small apartment, an explosion sounds a little closer, almost seeming to shake the walls as Sebastian checks on a sleeping Felicity. The ripples of it are felt even further down, when a low tremor rocks through the Chinese castle.

Felicity and John steady themselves against the wooden rail of the wide balcony. Several tiles and a piece of masonry fall in the churning black sea beneath. The other guests wonder beneath the moon in the massive terraces of the castle as if they haven’t felt a thing.

“Shado knows. She’s playing with us.” Digg says tightly.

Felicity is not looking at him. She stares at the dark horizon in front of her.

“Doesn’t matter. I can get to it. The information is in the safe. She looked right at it when I mentioned secrets.”

Digg hums. He’s about to say something when he spots someone over Felicity’s shoulder and tenses.

“Felicity… what is _he_ doing here?”

She frowns, turns to see who John means, and then freezes. Something heavy drops on her stomach and drags it down all the way to the floor. Time goes far more slowly down here, but in that moment, between one breath and another, it stops completely for Felicity.

He’s there, in a fitted black tux and bowtie, smiling softly as he leans against the railing and looking at her with what Felicity knows is something between fondness and expectancy.

Felicity clenches her jaw, turns to John.

“Just get to your room. I’ll take care of the rest.”

John shakes his head, exasperated and worried and annoyed all at the same time. “See that you do. We’re here to work.”

It’s almost an admonition but Felicity’s already brushing by her friend of almost nine years.

She walks towards him slowly, sips at her champagne. He’s leaning on the wooden rail, looking down at the foaming waves breaking against the cliffs as if he’s considering distance. The wind whips at his unbuttoned jacket.

“If I jumped, would I survive?”

Felicity leans in too, dread pushing her diaphragm up, making it hard to breathe.

“With a clean dive, perhaps.” She hears herself say. She can’t look at the darkness forever, but she’s afraid to look into his eyes too. she dares see him only from the corner of her eyes, almost afraid to fully turn towards him.

“Oliver, what are you doing here?” she sounds as resigned as she feels, but she hides the fear.

He’s the one to turn to her then, facing her fully with a smile and warm eyes.

Yes, she’s looking now. She is.

“I thought you might be missing me.” He tells her, amused at her question. He leans towards her, an invitation she wouldn’t have had to think about, once. But she stands straight-backed and distant, now.

“You know that I am.” It’s no pain, this admission. It’s the truth. She shakes her head slowly. “But I… I can’t trust you anymore.

The warmth disappears from Oliver’s eyes, the smile melts from his lips.

“So what?”

-

Oliver sips at the champagne as he studies the paintings on the walls of Felicity’s suite.

“Looks like Digg’s taste.”

“Actually, Miss Fei is partial to the Wu school painters of the Ming Dynasty.” Felicity says distractedly as she peers through the window at the guards patrolling the castle at ground level.

She walks to Oliver and turns around wordlessly. Just as wordlessly, he unzips her dress for her, the tips of his fingers following the zipper and calling shivers that raise up every fine hair on her body with tension.

She steps away with a curt thank you, strips and puts on elastic black jeans, a cotton turtleneck and hides her bright  air beneath a hood.

He’s staring at her, walking around her to see her from every angle.

“You look beautiful.”

_I have a job to do. We’re here to work._

“Thank you. Have a seat, please.”

Oliver raises one eyebrow at that, but sits down on the closest chair gracefully. Felicity puts on black gloves and pulls out a length of rope, kneels at Oliver’s feet and ties it around one of the chair’s leg.

He leans in, elbows on his knees, face close to hers.

“Felicity…”

She can’t _not_ look up at him when he says her name like that. She can’t.

His face is so close when she does look, that his warm breath fans on her lips. His eyes are wide and so blue with sadness.

“Does Abby miss me?”

The sharp stab of longing comes to her side, expected and never not painful because of it.

She gets up slowly, cups one cheek of his in her hand, lets it slide down to smooth on the lapel of his jacket. She can’t feel him through her gloves and maybe that’s the realest thing about him.

“You can’t imagine.”

Oliver looks away, uncomfortable.

Felicity lets out the rope as she moves to the window.

“What are you doing?” He asks her, an edge to his voice. Felicity tosses the rope out.

“Just getting some fresh air.” She tugs on the rope, testing it. It holds, with Oliver sitting on it.

He always could hold her weight, no matter what.

“Stay seated Oliver. Please.”

He doesn’t say anything. His face is blank and his eyes shuttered as he looks at her. Felicity doesn’t wait. She jumps out and starts rappelling down the wall. She doesn’t look down. This is without a doubt the part she hates the most, but the window she must reach is not far. When she’s there, she takes out the glass cutter from the ouch attached to her hip, but then suddenly, the rope gives and her insides churn and try to leave her body out of her throat all at once, because she’s falling.

Above her, the empty chair slides across the floor and wedges under the window. Only that saves Felicity from becoming a human egg cracked against the sharp cliffs beneath. She jolts to an abrupt – and bruising – stop 16 feet lower than where she should have been. She looks up at her bedroom window with pursed lips and starts climbing, muttering curses.

Felicity drops silently from the window into the darkened kitchen. She pulls a pistol from her belt and as she walks she screws on a silencer onto the barrel. She slips through the shadows of the halls towards a guard stationed at the head of the main grand staircase. The guard hears something and turns but before he face her, Felicity shoots him and darts forward to catch his body, sliding to her knees and lowering the guard silently to the floor.

She slips through a small crack of the dining room doors and closes them soundlessly behind her. She walks to the northern wall, to one of the smaller paintings hanging there. Carefully she removes it, revealing the safe beneath it. Felicity spins the dial, pulls it open, grabs then single envelope from within and stuffs it into her waistband, replacing it with an identical one.

The lights come on and she jolts around, gun already aiming for the door. But it’s too late.

Shado Fei is standing there, tall and unafraid, glaring at her. And by her side, Oliver is poiting the barrel of a gun straight between Felicity’s eyes.

“The gun, Felicity.” He says calmly, just as three men drag a bloodied Diggle into the room. Oliver fluently moves his arm to point the gun at Diggle without ever looking away from Felicity.

“Please.” He adds then, softer, mocking sweetness.

Digg shakes his head, but Felicity angles the barrel up towards the ceiling and then slowly places the dun on the table, slides it along the polished cherry wood until its about halfway down its length.

“Now the envelope, Miss Smoak.” Shado Fei says, the edge of anger tinting her tone.

Felicity reaches for her waistband slowly, places the envelope on the table as slides it across. She steps back, hands raised.

“Did he tell you?” She asks, chin jerking towards Oliver. “Or have you known all along?”

“That you’re here to steal from me? Or that we are actually asleep?”

Diggle looks at Felicity, his eyes practically shining with their silent ‘I told you so’. Even at gunpoint he manages to be annoying.

“I want to know the name of your employer.” Miss Fei says, an order that expects to be obeyed.

Oliver cocks the gun he’s holding at Digg’s temple.

“No point in threatening him in a dream, Oliver.” Felicity reminds him.

His smile is very familiar, his eyes shining with a passion that she knows.

“That depends on what you’re threatening.” He tells her calmly, the way he used to explain to her how to take apart a gun and then piece it back together. Felicity feels a shiver running down her spine. “Killing him would just wake him up. But pain…”

Oliver lowers his arm and shoots Diggle in the leg. John drops with a scream that tears through Felicity and makes her flinch. Oliver looks at her, utterly empty of feeling or reaction.

“Pain is in the mind.” He explains softly as he circles Diggle, who is being pulled to his feet by the men holding him and is gritting his teeth not to let his grunts out.

“And judging by the decor we’re in your mind, aren’t we Diggle?”

He aims for John’s other leg and in that moment, with both Shado and Oliver turned away, Felicity takes her chance. She springs for the table, slidding along its smooth surface and graps the gun, shoots John between the eyes before anyone can do anything about it.

John drops and the room starts to shudder, as if in a massive earthquake.

Felicity runs for the door – just as Diggle’s eyes open and he sits straighter in the armchair he fell asleep on up above.

He yanks the tubes on his wrist free.

Sebastian jumps for him. “What are you doing, it’s too soon!”

John ignores his panic and starts fiddling with the commands on the suitcase, on the bathroom floor of the small apartment. “I know, but the dream’s collapsing. I’m trying to keep Fei under a little bit longer. We almost got it.”

John grabs the case and pushes through the door to the

bedroom- following the tubes to where they meet Shado’s wrist, who is still asleep on the pink coverlet of her own bed.

Below, in the castle, Felicity runs towards the stairs as the building bucks and heaves around her like a living being, falling apart in pieces.

Shado tries to cover her head as great chunks of the castle fall around her and her men panic. Oliver walks through the destruction calmly, picks up the envelope Felicity dropped before and hands it to Shado.

“She was close.” He says, as if to himself. “Very close.”

But when she tears through the envelope she finds only blank pages. Rage tears through her.

“Stop her!”

Among the falling ruins and the shaking ground, the guards run to catch the thief. Oliver frowns slightly, confused, and then smiles to himself when he catches sight of the blank pages.

Felicity almost falls through the ruins as the stars start to shake apart. The moment she reaches the upper floor she stops and tears through the stolen envelope, reading through the confidential information as fast as she can, memorizing it.

Until she reaches the last page – and there is information on it that has been deliberately blackened out.

 _She knew_. The thought rings in her head louder than the groaning of the palace collapsing around her.

Up above, in the dilapidated hotel room, John opens the silver case, hands flying across the controls as he glances at Shado Fei’s stirring face.

“This isn’t gonna work.” He says through gritted teeth. “Wake her up, _now_.”

Sebastian runs to the bathroom, shakes felicity by her arms but she refuses to stir. He slaps her across the face, and below, in the palace that is collapsing on itself, Felicity is smashed sideways off her feet.

On the bed, Shado’s eyes flicker open, just as Sebastian protests loudly that Felicity refuses to wake up.

John, eyes on the briefcase, connects the second tube to the mechanism.

“Give her a kick.” He says shortly.

“what?”

“Dunk her.”

Sebastian catches himself – the anxiety blanking his mind for a moment before he catches on. But when he does, he moves, grabs Felicity by the shoulders and pushes her backwards. She falls in the chair, and just as she hits the water of the tub, down under Felicity glances up from the papers in her hands to the ceiling, as water explodes through the windows and floods what’s remaining of the palace.

She is swamped by water, it spins her harshly in all directions at once and almost tears her apart.

Until she breaks the surface, hands braced on the sides of the tub in the filthy bathroom of the hotel, gasping for air.

Shado and Digg burst through the room, fighting. She knocks Sebastian down with a kick, and deflects a punch from Diggle almost in the same movement. Felicity launches herself from the bathtub directly into the fight, slamming Shado Fei from the side and into the bathroom door, giving Diggle the chance to land a  punch against her jaw and knock her out of balance enough to immobilize her.

The fight is over.

-

Felicity is dripping wet but strangely calm, as she sits on the chair opposite to Shado Fei, staring at her unflinchingly.

Digg keeps an eye on the rioting crowd outside, Sebastian on Shado.

“Not even my security knows this apartment. How did you find it?”

Felicity shrugs. “It’s very difficult for the daughter of one of China’s most influential generals – and also head of a major world corporation like yourself – to keep a love nest like this secret. Especially when there’s a married woman involved.”

Shado scoffs. “She would never.”

“And yet, here we are… with a dilemma.” She adds, eyes firm on her target.

“You got what you came for.” Shado says disdainfully.

“Not really though. The key piece of information wasn't there, was it, Miss Fei?”

Digg’s eyes move away from the widow and this time his worry is for her.

“They’re getting closer, Felicity.” He warns.

In the train’s compartment, just as the sun starts to really peek through the horizon, Todashi slips a pair of headphones over Sebastian’s ears and starts the music.

Felicity looks at Shado Fei, who seems very busy looking at the floor, the stained carpet on it amassing her attention.

“You held something back because you knew what we were up to. So the question is, why let us in at all.”

Shado Fei smiles, still as defiant now as she was when she was elegant and perfectly put together in that dining room before.

“An audition, so to speak.” She says simple.

Felicity frowns. “For what?”

“Doesn’t matter, you failed.”

The violent noises get closer, almost up the stairs. The riot is getting closer, almost to their doorstep.

“I extracted every piece of information you had in there.” Felicity protests, almost out of reflex.

Shado Fei’s smile gets a fraction wider. “Yes, but your deception was obvious.”

The first notes of Edith Piaf's " _Non, je ne regrette rien_ ," start sounding in the distend background of the room, a strange and massive collection of notes that sound more like distant horns than anything.

“I think it’s time for you to go, Miss Smoak.”

“you know very well that the cooperation that hired us won’t accept failure. We won’t last two days.” And she’ll be damned if she puts John in that kind of danger.

The slow musical horns get louder and so do the sounds from the crowd.

Felicity gets up and points the gun at Shado Fei’s kneecap.

“I’m afraid we’re gonna have to do this the more traditional way, Miss Fei. Tell me the rest of the information.”

Shado grits her teeth. Meets Felicity Smoak’s eye and sees it in them that she will pull that trigger if she has to.

 _Pain is in the mind_.

Shado looks away, ashamed but unwilling to give in so easily… She grits her teeth and curls bare toes on the carpe… and then notices something a little out of place.

It makes her laugh.

Felicity is so taken aback that she actually puts the gun down. she shares a bewildered look with Digg.

“I’ve always hated this carpet.” Shado says slowly. “It stained and frayed in such ugly ways. But very definitely made of wool.”

Felicity looks at Sebastian, who shrugs, as lost as she feels.

“But right now, my feet are standing on polyester.” Shado explains, the hint of wonder in her eyes as she looks at Felicity now, all fear gone.

Felicity glares at Sebastian fiercely.

“Which means I’m not here at all, in my little apartment.” She chuckles and it’s warm. “You have lived up to your reputation Miss Smoak. I’m still dreaming.”

Felicity looks over by the window where John was a moment ago, but he’s not there anymore. He woke up, and the rest of them are about to as well. That or about to be torn apart by an angry mob who’s going to pour through the door any moment.

Shado gets on her feet, her eyes smiling as if she’s looking at a friend.

“A dream within a dream. I’m impressed.”

She sounds it. Felicity is utterly at loss, but also afraid and disappointed and angry. They failed. Failure was a non option and they failed.

Fuck.

She glances at her watch. The music is getting deafening now, and so is the crowd.

Shado approaches Felicity slowly.

“But since it’s my dream, should we play by my rules?”

“We would, if it were.” Sebastian says, shoulders slumped.

Shado turns to him.

“But it so happens that we’re not.” Felicity ads. By the time Shado has turned back to look at her, she’s vanished. The door explodes open and countless people pour through, to grab at Sebastian.

Who shivers awake on his seat in the train.

“Asshole.” Digg says immediately, before Sebastian has even twitched in his seat. “How could you get the carpet wrong?”

“It wasn’t my fault!”

Digg is good and angry now. “You’re the _architect_!”

“I didn’t know she was gonna rub her fucking feet on it!”

Felicity is already up and moving. She throws a wad of cash at Todashi and gets up to retrieve her backpack.

“Lets go.”

“And you!” Digg turns to her. “What the hell was that?”

“I had it under control.” Felicity mutters. Digg scoffs.

“I’d hate to see out of control.”

“There’s not time for this!” She snaps, but then bites her lip trying to reign her temper, her panic. Deep breath. “I’m getting off at Kyoto.”

“Why, he’s not gonna check every compartment.”

Felicity looks away from him. “I don’t like trains.”

Digg frowns but says nothing. He regulates the dials on the silver case to keep Shado under for a minute more. Then rips the tubes of her wrist, rolls them up and slams the shiver case shut.

Todashi opens the door and they all exit and take different directions.

A minute later, Shado Fei wakes up and there is only a kid with her in the cabin, reading a comic. She looks at her wrist and sees a faint mark there. It makes her smile.

Very rarely does she listen to rumor, but this time, they proved to be true.

-

A few hours after she’s booked a room, after she’s had a shower and changed clothes, she starts feeling restless. The walls confine her and the city seems to flicker every time she blinks. She can’t stop fidgeting and not even coding can calm her.

She gets up from the bed and paces, sits on the small coffee table and pulls out the arrowhead from her pocket. She holds it between her finger and her thumb and lets it spin on the table. Pulls out a handgun and checks to see if it’s loaded as the arrowhead spins on. She studies that motion with intent, bringing the gun close to her head. The soft scrapping of the tip of the arrowhead against the wood grows louder and louder until it’s a the hiss of a freight train in her ears. Until she can’t hear anything else but the loud rush of blood on her fingertips and that screeching sound… pounding against the side of her head.

The arrowhead’s spinning slows. It tips to one side and falls.

The sound of the train stops with it, just like that.

Felicity takes a deep breath, only then realizing she’d been holding it.

She phone’s ringing jolts her into awareness. She drops the gun and grabs the phone, answers it already knowing who is on the other line.

“Yes, hello.”

There’s a small pause on the other side of the line.

“Hi, mom.”

Felicity closes her eyes, her throat suddenly a closed fist.

“Hey baby.”

She can almost see her daughter, exactly as she used to be the last time she laid eyes on her. Playing in the sun out in the yard, her pink dress with which little embroidered flowers, her hair threaded with gold because of the sun.

“How are you, honey?”

Abby hesitates. “I’m okay I guess.”

No four year old should ever sound so unsure, Felicity thinks and she has to bit her lip to keep her tears at bay.

“Okay? Just okay? I think you can do better than that.”

“I think I know how to code in javascript now.” Abbie tries, and though it sounds more like a question than a statement, felicity will take it.

“Yeah? That’s so great! Java is a good programming language to start with, though it’s a bit difficult. I’m so proud of you for learning it baby.”

“Yeah, I had fun learning it.”

Felicity smiles. That sounds a bit more genuine. A bit like there might be a smile in there, at the corner of her mouth maybe. “Yeah, I bet you did.”

“I had brunch with aunt Thea too. she said to say hello and that she misses on you shopping trips.”

“Oh I miss her too.” She misses everything and everyone and getting back to all that she lost is what keeps her going even when determination and will fails her. “Did you have fun.”

“Yeah. Aunt Thea’s always fun.”

“She is. Tell her hello for me, ok.”

“Kay.” The silence goes on for a moment longer.  “I miss you.” Her daughter whispers from the other side of the world.

“I miss you too, baby.”

“Grandma says you’re never coming home.”

Felicity closes her eyes. Tries not to let her anger show.

“Could you put grandma on the phone for me baby?”

Her daughter waits a beat.

“She’s shaking her head.”

Felicity’s hand tightens on the phone. She wishes she could throw it at the wall, at Moira Queen’s head. She wishes she could break the whole world in two.

And then she lets it go.

“I love you more than life, Abby.”

“So why can’t you just be here. I’ll be good, I promise, just come back.”

She can tell tears are just around the corner, and Felicity’s aren’t that far behind either. She sits down heavily on the sofa, elbows on her knees and almost curling around the phone, her heart trying to climb up her throat.

“Oh baby, this is not your fault. I need you to remember that okay.”

Abbie says nothing and that’s the first sign that her daughter doesn’t believe her.

“I know I’ve been away a long time, but I’m doing everything I can to get back to you.

“So do better.”

Ah, there’s anger too.

“I will.” Felicity says, weighting in and meaning it. “I will. I promise. Do you believe me?”

“Yeah.” It takes a while and it’s wobbly, but its there.

 _She won’t be four forever. She’ll stop waiting for you eventually, just like you stopped waiting for your own father_.

The though tears at her like a rusted blade.

“Mom… is dad with you?”

Felicity feels like the room is collapsing. Her brilliant daughter can code at four years old, but there are some things she doesn’t understand. Permanent absence is something her kid struggles with.

Seems to run in the family.

How could she make the difference, anyway? Neither parent is there, and though she hasn’t seen her father in almost a year, her mother keeps promising her she’ll come back. If hope is to say alive in a four year old, it must be all inclusive.

“No, baby.” She clears her throat. “No, we talked about this remember? Daddy’s gone.”

“I…” Abbie sniffs and there’s a rustle on the phone. “I have to go now.” Abigail says and Felicity has to bite back a sigh.

“Okay. I’ll send you some presents tomorrow – check your account.”

“I will.”

“Be good for-“

The line drops and Felicity flinches as if she’s been hit in the face. She stares at the phone like it robbed her personally and it’s all she can do to put it back on the table unharmed. It’s not the fault of some poor electronic that Moira Queen despises her.

But instead on dwelling on that she downs her drink.

The knock on the door makes her think better of pouring herself another one. Felicity grabs the arrowhead, the gun, movies to the door…

It’s John.

“Our ride is here.” He tells her.

Felicity nods, turns around and wipes her hands down her face before she grabs her bad. She can feels John’s eyes on her back.

“Felicity… are you okay?”

She tenses, but tries to immediately let it go. “Yeah. Why?”

“Down in the dream, with Oliver showing up like that…”

Felicity winces. Looks away. “Yeah. Im sorry about your leg.”

“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” John say softly. It sounds like a question but its not. He’s already made up his mind.

“One apology is all you’re getting Digg.” She turns and adds a smile to it. “And a Big Belly, if really insist. Where’s Sebastian?”

The change of topic and the look in her eyes are enough to let John know to drop it.

“Hasn’t shown. Wanna wait”

“No.” they walk out and Felicity closes the door behind herself. “We were supposed to deliver Fei’s expansion plans to Stellmore International two  hours ago. By now they’ll know we’ve failed. It’s time to disappear.”

Digg nods, as if he’s already thought through it.They walk to the elevator.

“Where will you go?”

Felicity shrugs. “Buenos Aires. I can lie low there. Maybe sniff out a job when things quiet down. You?”

Digg hesitates, regrets ever asking. Then tells the truth.

“Stateside.”

Felicity looks away, her smile wistful. “Of course. Give my love to Lyla.”

“I will.”

He wraps an arm around her shoulders and pulls her for a hug. Felicity sighs and lets it happen, curls into him a bit, just for a moment.

The elevator reaches the roof, and it ends.

“Thank you.” Felicity says softly as the door start sliding open.

 **“** Anytime **.”**

The helicopter sits, rotors spinning and kicking up a stiff wind. As Felicity and Digg reach the door, it slides open. She has one leg on leather-padded interior when she freezes.

Sebastian, complete with a bloody nose, sits, slumped against the window and across from him, Shado Fei smiles and nods politely at her.

“He sold you out.” she explains calmly. “Though to come to me and bargain for his life.”

One of the met serving as Shado Fei’s bodyguards offers Felicity a gun.

“You may have the satisfaction.”

Felicity frowns. Shakes her head.

“That’s not how I deal with things.”

Fei raises her eyebrows but then shrugs. “Suit yourself. Would you work with him again?”

“No.” there’s no doubt about that.

Sebastian gets pulled out of the chopper. Fei monitions Felicity and Diggle inside. The chopper rises and Felicity watches Sebastian being dragged off the roof.

“What will you do to him?”

“Nothing at all. Though I can’t speak for Stellmore International.”

“And what do you want from us?”

Shado Fei turns to them, and her face is unreadable, all pleasantness gone.

“Inception.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> continued in it's own story


	3. matrix au

> _And yet you could not sleep_   
>  _poor body, the earth_   
>  _still clinging to you_
> 
> _Louise Glück, excerpt of **The Garden**_

Later on, nobody would be surprised that it was Felicity the first to pin her down as a potential. That girl may not have been born in the Matrix, but she had been breathing its code ever since she was three and could unlock its code faster than anyone Diggle had ever met – pod-born or otherwise.

It wasn’t just a question of talent. Operators were chosen only from the very best of the Academy, and went through some of the most harsh and intensive trainings of the fleet’s program. They had everyone’s lives on their hands up there and were trained to be fast, creative, and able to think on their feet, or people died. Diggle had been goddmned lucky with Cisco. That boy was a marvel – and considering how reckless his crew was, Digg was grateful for him to the surface and back. But Felicity was something else.

Operators were arguably always the best hackers on board on the ship - but Felicity was better than anyone on _any_ ship.

Zion had been courting her for a position in the Command for years, but she insisted on being in the field. Diggle was glad of it – as was her captain and her crew. He was convinced that she was about 58% of the reason why Verdant had one of the lowest mortality rates a first line of defense ship had recorded in decades, and an unusually high percentage of freed minds. Felicity seemed to know the behavioral patters of the Matrix before they even happened and she was intuitive about their targets in a way that seemed almost precognitive. It was why the Arrow and its captain kept her so close – among other reasons.

But those other reasons were always kept silent. Fraternizing of that kind on a ship wasn’t exactly approved by the council.

And yet, even though nobody believed in that girl more than her captain did, she came to _Diggle_ with Sara Lance’s file.

She sat down with him in the officer’s hall at 3 am, and though she looked like death warmed over, she started talking to him as if they’d just seen each other in the hallway five minutes ago.

It was one of the best things about Felicity. The consistency of warmth in a world made of metal, where everything bright had gone long ago.

“What are you doing still around, Smoak? Get some sleep, you look like hell.”

She gave him a smile that was full of warmth, with eyes that brimmed with grief. “Aww, you’re making me blush.”  

Digg raised one eyebrow at her.

“You couldn’t blush right now if I held you upside down by your ankles.”

“Huh… you might have a point there.” She said, rubbing her hand down her face, the thin cheerfulness slipping and letting in how exhausted she truly was. “I have someone I need you to check out.”

She pushed her pad towards him. It had a sole unmarked file on the desktop. He knew she wanted him to open it.

Digg raised her eyebrows at her.

“Your boy lose faith in your abilities all of a sudden?”

There was no small amount of disapproval in his tone when he said that. Felicity was one of his closest friends, and despite her happy nature, that girl had very little in ways of family, so if Oliver was giving her a hard time, Diggle would be very happy to set the man straight.

“No.” Felicity had said decisively, pushing the unmarked file in front of him. “But Verdant has to dock at least for a week for repairs and I don’t think this girl has that much time.”

Diggle frowned, took the pad but kept his eyes on Felicity.

“What happened?”

She licked her dry lips.

“Signal got tracked faster than I could block it.” She says in a murmur, looking down to her plate, fiddling with her mushrooms. “Calamari almost broke into the ship before the whole crew made it back and I could trigger the EMP.”

He knew that tone. Suddenly the dark circles under her eyes and the tenseness to her frame made a whole new sense beyond exhaustion. As did Oliver’s very conspicuous absence. That boy very rarely spent a willing minute apart from her when they were off duty.

“Felicity…”

Her lip shook and she bit it, lowering her head and counting on her thick dark curls to cover her face even though the officers hall was almost empty.

“He almost… 20 stitches on his left shoulderblade, and he’s so fucking stubborn - he keeps refusing sedation.”

Digg reached for her hand.

“Better to be in pain than helpless.” he said softly. No pod born likes to be put under. A lot don’t even trust sleep.

It’s not like she doesn’t know, anyway.

Felicity purses her lips. He knows she disagrees. Felicity can be ruthlessly efficient when she needs to be, and her mind is as cold as its sharp sometimes, but she has a thing for people she loves being in pain. Namely that she doesn’t allow it.

“I should have known. The whole pipeline on level 21 has been crawling with machines lately, I should have _known_ …”

“You cannot know everything, Felicity.” He told her softly, with a small smile. “You’re good, but not even you are _that_ good.”

She huffed and shook her head as if to shake her mood away from her shoulders, like dust.

“He’s fine. The crew’s fine. I’m fine. I’ll deal.” she nodded firmly, to herself. “Look at the file.”

She _would_ deal. Her eyes were shiny, but her cheeks dry and after a few blinks she was tightly wrapped together again, and waiting for him to pay the right attention to the information she’d gathered for him.

It did make him curious, to tell the truth, right from the start. Felicity had known him a long time. She knew who he was looking for. Who he’d been looking for almost all his life. She did not believe as he believed, but her respect for him had never faltered because of it. Whenever she had come to him with someone, Diggle had always wise in listening. This time was no different.

Five lines in, and Digg realized where the catch was. And why Felicity had brought this file to him, of all the captains who might listen to her word.

He looked up at her with confusion and disbelief… and not a little surprise.

She preceded him.

“I know, ok. I _know_.” she said, raising her hands in the all-known ‘hear me out’ signal. “Just give me a chance.”

“Always.” He didn’t even hesitate. “I didn’t think you were a believer.” Digg said then, taking her in as if he hadn’t seen her before.

She rolled her eyes at him.

“I’m a believer in freeing as many people from that hellhole as possible. And I think this girl wants out.”

“Her midiclorian count is the highest I have ever seen.” Digg whispered as he read.

“Yeah.”

“She’s old.” They never extracted people past a certain age. The mind became too attached to its reality and refused to let go. They could pop right after they were freed and Felicity knew this. “Too old, some might say.”

“But not you?”

Diggle didn’t answer immediately. There was the kind of data on Sara Lance’s file that he had never seen before. It made his hands sweat a little.

But there were discrepancies too.

“You have no hacking file for her. Is she _that_ good?” this time his surprise was utterly genuine, as was his disbelief… and the dangerous beginnings of hope.

“No. She’s not a hacker.”

Diggle looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”

Felicity’s data showed Sara Lance had an _extraordinary_ perception of the weaknesses and glitches of the Matrix for someone of her age, and if the way she had of going around the code of the program itself was any indication, she could affect it without even realizing it. That was almost without precedent. It was a trait Diggle had only found in potentials and all the potentials were dwellers of the dark net. That was where the question started for all of them.

But not for Sara Lance, apparently.

Frankly speaking, it was a miracle she was still alive.  Felicity was right in saying the girl didn’t have much time.

“How is this possible.” He wondered aloud. She had almost drowned twice. Felicity had managed to track the code for both times. The discrepancies in it were so subtle nobody but her would have ever found them.

Yet they were there. And unmistakable.

It was their good fortune – and a sign of providence – that the Neb only had a couple more hours on the doc.

“Her history is further down in the file.” Felicity continued. “Caitlyn helped me with the psych part, but essentially, I think the trauma she went through fracture her psyche so deeply that it interferes with the signals Matrix has wired into her senses. She perceives the deceptive reality of the Matrix, but it’s unconscious. She’s not… chasing anything, not like we were. She’s running from it.” Felicity held his eyes steadily, her conviction as unshakable as her intellect was undeniable.

“Eventually she’ll get killed by agents, or go mad.”

Diggle straightened in his seat. “No. No, she will not.”


	4. matrix au ii - the black canary

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for mentions of self-harm and just general violence and low self esteem.

The Black Canary of the old world used to love wrecking things. She never had any kind of finesse when hacking, not really. No gift for it but what she picked up along the way on her own, but she loved the destructive idea of it. Of bringing shit down just to watch them fall. Making people lose whole pieces of their lives. Stealing shit just for the lolz. From those who had anything to steal, anyway. She wasn’t a big-time anything, not really. The most trouble she cause was some really embarrassing rumors about Hollywood douchebags. But she did have one talent, and only one: timing.

Timing was everything, and from someone who couldn't - and still can’t - keep a schedule to save her fucking life, that is something.

But it hadn’t really been about _time_. She’d never even paid attention to time – she lived in her computer for fuck’s sake and when she wasn’t breathing on the screen she was partying, or getting into bloody-knuckled scraps or fucking her way up and down the city she happened to be passing through at the time. Nothing mattered, nothing lasted or made an impression deep enough to scratch her surface. Nothing felt  _real_ enough - and wasn’t that the problem, huh. No, it had never been about time. It had been about knowing when to swing, when to retreat. Picking her fights carefully. She had a sixth sense about knowing when to run and when to throw in her whole weight. And when she fought, she went in hard, and to the end.

It had been what made her such a dangerous brawler of the back allies. She was quick, and though all knees and elbows, she still fought like a boxer. Maybe even a little bit out of resentment. Nobody every saw her as worth more than a pretty face, so she bruised her own face. The pretty little bird who spoke five languages with no accent and nobody could figure out how. What a joke – on them, that is. Whoever ‘them’ happened to be. Honestly though, most of the time the fact that she was scrawny as fuck and everyone underestimated her worked to her advantage.

_Little bird my ass._

She kinda started to liked it, after a while. Well, no, she didn’t, but she liked the way they went down after they underestimated her. She’d be their little bird, sure. Show her little teeth. _Come a little closer_.

She got to the tipping point fast. The point where only pain and dreams felt real anymore. She thought she was going insane in there, and she might have – gone insane or gotten killed or offed herself. She’d never done things by halves, had she?

But she didn’t.

The resistance found her, those fuckers.  And the Black Canary woke up into her second life screaming as hard as she always had in her first, fighting within an inch of her life. Which was just about the only inch of it she had left when she took her first real breath. She would have torn them to pieces of she could. Men, women, machine. But she’d spent the first 18 years of her life in a pod of goo, trapped in her own mind and lied to with every heartbeat, being fed the liquefied dead so that she could be a battery to fucking pieces of tin cans. So no, she didn’t have a lot of strength of any bullshit. Muscles aren’t useful for much when you’ve never used them.

Didn’t mean she didn’t try though.

She was a fucking nightmare. A little hairless worm that left the shape of her teeth on anyone who tried to talk to her into being quieter, into being nicer, like she owed them anything. Like the fact that she had been a slave in her own mind and now she wasn’t, meant something?

Fuck that bullshit! 

She was dumped back to Zion so fast it was hilarious. Or it would be, later. But then and there it had felt like a validation that this world was no better than the other and that she wasn’t any less of a shit human in this one – no personality upgrade coming up anytime soon - so she might as well own it. She was shoved into the Academy with the other poddies - and that was it really.

Oh, and it also was where she met everyone else.

Oliver, the asshole. She fucked around with him a few times, but he was too fucking sad to touch, under all that grim-dark-bullshit persona of his and she couldn’t stand him when she wasn’t fucking him. Palmer, Cisco, Caitlin, around whom she could never be more than 10 minutes at a time, or she’d go crazy, snap at them and then feel like shit. Iris, who was too fucking beautiful to stand really. But she was crazy about Barry so that was a no. (Didn’t stop Laurel from trying.) She might have been nice to Cisco, a few times. It was impossible not to be. He smiled too sweet; her teeth would ache every time he was happy about something.

Tommy too. Yeah, Tommy.

Tommy was tolerable, okay. He was... yeah. Though she didn’t like it when he looked at her in that way of his. It made her feel naked or some shit. Like he knew all the sick shit lurking in the diseased regions of her brain. Made her wanna hide for a week and take a scalding bath before she touched anyone. But for some godforsaken reason he still hung out with her no matter how much of a bitch she was, and because he and Oliver were like, the center mass of the group, that’s how Laurel ended up surrounded by people too good to be around her.

Yeah, whatever.

She met Nyssa at the academy too.

Look, Nyssa was alright. She’d always been alright. It wasn’t Nyssa’s fault that when she first got out, Laurel was angry enough to want to chew the whole world to bits. But at first… yeah at first it hadn’t been that nice, the two of them in the same room.

What did Laurel know about nice anyway? She never was and never would be nice. The closest she got to it was proximity to Cisco. And that wasn’t even true! ‘Nice’ was too bland for Cisco – he was a fucking _sweetheart_ , that’s what! Laurel would legit fucking murder someone upsetting Cisco even slightly, let alone for real. Like that time almost buried Thawne’s head in the cement for bullying him, and almost got her own ass court-martialed.

So no, nice was not it.

But Nyssa was different. From everyone.

She’d gotten out when she’d been 14 – John Diggle had fished her out. Rumor had it  _she_ had found him, and not the other way around, like all the rest. She’d been the Demon, up there. A goddamned legend, even in the Matrix. Perfect. ****

Nyssa had seemed to Laurel everything that she wasn’t and the picture reflecting back from that kind of mirror hadn’t been anything she’d enjoyed. Laurel saw the absence of every flaw that had carved her up, when she looked at Nyssa. The genius kid, the one every captain wanted on their ship even as a two-year-old recruit of the academy. Already wise at 15, always a dozen steps ahead of everyone else, she was insufferable. Reserved, but never dismissive. Controlled, but never rude, never cold. Always so fucking self aware. Always the best at every fucking thing. She used the construct like it was art, she hacked like it was breathing. She was lethal even out of the Matrix and could snap your neck in three moves.

It would drive Laurel up the every wall from the core to the surface of the scorched earth they inhabited. For a while, at least. Like, a couple of years.

Yeah well, it’s not like she had the most even fucking temper alright, lay off.

She doesn’t even remember how it happened really. How they went from two girls trying to tear each other to pieces in the construct, to them getting drunk together that one night. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that while Laurel felt like she was running a race, Nyssa had been ready to hold a hand out the entire time. Maybe. She doesn’t know.

Whatever.

Cisco might have had something to do with it too. The fact that he liked her a lot now and that – though Laurel would never admit it – she liked him too. Everyone else knew anyway. Maybe it proved people that she actually had a soul or some shit like that. 

Or what happened with Tommy - the fact that after the thousands fight, they finally fucked and laid it to rest.

God, how had _that_ happened anyway? Fuck if Laurel knew. When she stopped to think about it she still got weak knees from fear. How had they gone from screwing to doing something else entirely. There was that time when, with the sweat still warm on their bodies, she’d tried to throw him out of her room. She’d screamed at him and pushed him away and he’d just looked at her in that way that made her want to get out of the room and put a steel door between them, and said ‘no’.

Just like that. Soft, ‘no’. Convinced.  

‘I’m in love with you, god help me. No.’

_Jesus!_

She’d had nobody to tell. Well, that was a lie – she’d told Nyssa, obviously. They’d just finished assembling their gear, and weapons, and her hand had still been smelling like gunpowder and metal and she’d just said it. 

‘I think we’re together now. I don’t know. something.’ It wasn't like a lot of people hung around her for the statement to be confusing.

Nyssa had looked up from where she was assembling her blaster for the thousands time, and smiled that small, secretive smile of hers.

‘I’m happy for you.’

And that was it.

How _had_ it happened?

Did it even matter? She might not have been sure of how, but after she, Nyssa and Tommy started serving on the Nebb, it didn’t matter. She might have liked Nyssa by then, but even if she hadn’t, there would have been nobody else that Laurel would rather trust to keep her alive inside the Matrix. Nobody.

Some said Nyssa was cold and brutal, but Laurel was totally cool with it. Hell, she loved her for it. And she knew it was a lie, anyway. Nyssa was… Nyssa was _kind_ , ok. And quiet. She never complained even when she had to work extra - so they all made sure she never had to do that. She was professional, efficient, reliable. She was the perfect First Mate and the only person Laurel ever wanted watching her back. So if Nyssa needed things to get done a certain way and only taht way, she would see to it that they were done that way and that was it. no fucking around, no whining about it. She worked her ass off to keep them alive, and most of the time she succeeded. The rest was details. The only gift they could give back to her that she would accept was space, so the crew tried their best to at least do that

Digg was cool too. He was batshit about some things, sure, but there were worse assholes to serve under. He was a big believer, Diggle. Laurel had never thought Nyssa would buy any of the Oracle’s prophecy bullshit, but whether she believed or not, Nyssa followed orders. And maybe she didn’t believe as Digg believed, but she _did_ believe in Digg. Truth be told, Laurel started believing in him too, after a while.

It wasn’t so bad really. There was always pestilences like Isabel ‘the ravager’ to deal with, but the bitch could be manageable if she kept five feet of distance from Laurel at all times and her mouth shut.

They were a joke for some of the fleet and outcasts for others but it’s not like Laurel missed the company. Tommy was all she needed, Nyssa and Cisco were the only people she wanted, and the kid was tolerable, so fuck everyone else.

They survived. They freed people and fought hard to stay alive and free. They had a purpose. What more was there to it anyway?


	5. matrix au iii - Nyssa

Nyssa never believed in the Oracle. She never believed in the prophecy or any of the spiritual bull that believes liked to throw around. She believed in reality and the war in their hands. She believed she spent her life killing people, so that she could free people and the contradiction of that didn’t leave much room in her soul for thoughts of saviors and the transcendent.

So the first time she and Digg went to see the Oracle, she’d been about to jump out of her skin she’d been so impatient and _aware_ of everything.

She _hated_ taking her crew out on such ridiculous reasons - especially the newbies. They always seemed to be picked off so easily, no matter how hard she tried to keep them safe – and that year they’d had three two that year.

Roy had been still learning then. ( _hell, he was still learning now_!) He hadn’t been a talent in the academy, but though everyone thought Digg always picked the bright ones, Nyssa knew the truth of it. Digg didn’t go for the obvious – he went for the ones with potential. Spotting it was his greatest gift. Roy for instance, excelled in weaponry, even in the beginning. But he’d been a bit slower in other things, especially hand to hand. Ever since the moment he’d stepped on the ship, she’d had hours and hours of hand to hand training planed in the construct for him. It hadn’t made Roy like her any better, but it had made him capable. Thea though had been different, right off the bat.

She was in instinctual creature, Speedy, bright and fast on her feet, a natural in the Matrix. Quick and silent as a cat. She had been the first mind Oliver had freed once he was operational on a ship. He’d almost died getting her out of there. How he’d convinced his hten-captain, Nyssa had never known, especially since Lyla was known for being one of the most rational captains out there who never took unnecessary risks. But Oliver had had his way – he’d gotten his sister out of there.

It hadn’t seemed to matter that she wasn’t really his sister at all. That his life in the Matrix had been a lie. It hadn’t seemed to matter to Thea either, since she’d kept calling him brother even after he got her out. How he had managed to convince her to doubt her reality when she hadn’t been a potential, Nyssa wasn’t sure. Perhaps looking for her brother for years had already brought Thea to a point where she’d do anything to get him back.

Nyssa never knew. She never asked. To her it didn’t make sense and she thought it was remarkably close to insane that people would risk so much in the name of something so unquantifiable as love. Something that hadn’t even been real, just part of a big lie fed into their veins and brains to keep them asleep.

But then again she was the same person who, if it had been possible to grow eyes in the back of her RSI’s head to keep her crew safe in the Matrix, she would have.

Which was why she was so angry that they had to go into the matrix on useless missions like talking to a woman who thought she could see the future.

She’s stood tall and stiff in the entrance of the Oracle’s kitchen, hands linked behind her, back straight as a spear. The Oracle hadn’t been what she’d expected. Nyssa didn’t really know what she’d expected, exactly – hadn’t even though about it much. The Oracle was a slight woman, short hair and dark eyes, a round mouth that seemed to always be smiling. Her small apartment had been filled with children and women, and it had smelled like cookies.

 _Digg will find the One_ , she’d said. Nyssa hadn’t cared. Her impatience had only grown actually.

“You don’t believe me, I know.” The Oracle had said with a big warms smile that was as much out of place in Nyssa’s life as the words she was speaking. “Waste of your time, right?”

Is _was_ a waste of her time.

“I don’t believe in the One.” Nyssa had said instead; simply, flatly. The oracle had smiled again, her almond-shaped eyes crinkling just a bit at the corners with warmth.

“You will, don’t worry.”

Nyssa had pressed her lips in a tight line to keep a scathing reply back.

“She’ll be older than your usuals. Late twenties. Watch for that.”

_She?_

But more importantly, “We don’t free pencilnecks that old. They die.”

“You will free this one. She’ll demand it.” It had almost sounded like a warning. Nyssa had wanted to roll her eyes but she hadn’t done that since she’d been a teen in the Matrix chasing ghosts.

“If you say so.”

Non-engagement hadn’t been one of her favorite tactics but preserving energy was.  

“I do say so, indeed.”

The oracle’s smile had made Nyssa want to shift on her feet.

“You don’t believe a word I’m telling you, do you?” It seemed to amuse her. Nyssa said nothing. “And you’re so protective of your crew, you hate to put them in danger for this bullshit.”

Nyssa stiffened.

“Especially the new ones. But don’t worry they’ll be fine. Roy’s cut will only take some stitches and don’t worry about Cisco, he’ll only have a slight concussion.”

“Do you have a point?”

The Oracle had laughed, a free, honest sound. “No patience for bullshit. That’s _always_ been my favorite thing about you. So let me tell you why I wanted to meet you today.”

Nyssa tensed involuntarily.

“You’re going to fall in love, Nyssa. My god are you going to fall in love.” Her eyes had twinkled. She’d sighed and Nyssa had wanted to crawl out of her skin. “You’re going to love so hard and so fierce that even death will pale in front of it. And this woman – the woman you will love - she is going to be the One.”

She kept Roy close to her side as they got out and when he didn’t even get a scratch on him, Nyssa felt vindicated.

A week later they were attacked by sentinels. One of them almost tore Roy’s arm off before they could release an EMP. Twelve stitches. Cisco was in the med bay for a couple of days but when the Hammer got there to give them a jump, Caitlyn assured them that though he had a grade two concussion, he would be fine.

Nyssa lived with her heart in her throat for almost a week, fighting between the explosive anger of her having a ‘fate’ and the future written in stone. A different kind of cage. Then made her peace with herself. what would happen would happen, and there was nothing she could do about it but keep fighting and stay alive. She cried herself to sleep that night. And then went on living as if it didn’t matter.


	6. Immortals

> _To_ _die for love_  
>  to die of love  
>  to die in love  
>  to die with love  
>  to die over love  
>  to die without love  
>  to die to love  
>  to die in the mine  
>  and be a “mine”  
>  in the arms of someone’s  
>  chest wound, “Here I will die of the above.”
> 
> _Fanny Howe, from Gone: Poems_

She unstrapped the laces of her sandals and abandoned them on the side of the green meadow. The morning sun had yet to break over the peaks of the of the tall buildings around her, but she had time.

Time was the only thing that she never seemed to run out of.

She turned her face to the east, closed her eyes and waited. Listened. The night’s last breaths clung to the air, the way this pale spring morning still clung to winter’s chill. The cold raised the tiny hairs on her arms, on the back of her neck, her legs. She welcomed it, let it sink in – enjoyed the shivers it brought forth. The morning birds broke the silence, their song becoming more stubborn as if they too were waiting for the sun.

She shared their joy, though many would be surprised to know it.

In every story ever told, she was the one who always took and never gave. Not anything anyone might want, anyway. The accursed one, the one whose powers living beings dreaded. Even when mortals had believed in her and her brothers and sisters, she had been feared, ever loved. Sacrifices and whispered prayers used to come to her ears, never celebrations in her name.

Not from the world above, anyway. The one below was different; it did not forget so easily.

She had left her mark in the collective mind of humanity as the dreary creature that dwelt in dark places, and though she could understand where the image came from, she also found it so inaccurate it was almost funny.

The truth had been forgotten long ago by the world above. Even by the deathless beings of her times that still remembered what she had once been, before becoming the ruler of the other side.

But that truth lived in her heart still, an ever-green thing that could not be forgotten or mistaken.

She had always _loved_ the sun and all living, growing things. She welcomed them into her domain to take care of them, in celebration of them. To give them peace, endless fields of it.

And retribution, where it was needed, for she was Justice too., as she was Vengeance. Because though she loved and perpetuated life, above all else, she was fair to the dead.

But those thoughts were too heavy for such a beautiful morning. She walked forward, sinking her feet into the dewed grass as the sun finally rose, its first rays breaking on the glass of the skyscrapers into a thousand reflections, washing her with warmth and light. She could feel the echo of her own force pulsing through the soft earth beneath the soles of her feet. Upwards through her legs, the strength of the earth and all that lay beneath it surged into her, like an embrace. It settled in the centre of her chest, awake, all-encompassing and old as creation.

She wiggled her toes, let them sink into the soft earth. It tickled a little and made her smile. She could smell the first of spring in the air, when the sun invited the budding flowers of the lemons and peach trees around her to open up again and soak in warmth.

She had been prepared to spend the whole day soaking in the sun, perhaps walking the mountains close to the city and rediscovering new grooves, awakening old memories.

But it was not meant to be.

She felt the pull of the call as one would feel a whisper at the back of their neck. It traveled down her spine, raising awareness.

She opened her palms and let the power that flowed through her from the earth, stretch outwards through her hands, opening a portal through the Aether into her apartment.

She stepped through the ring of fire into her loft and there _she_ was: dark and forbidding as she always looked, in the middle of the open-plan loft. Embraced by the golden light of the morning sun, Thanatos’ long black robes looked as ephemeral as smoke, a creation held together with a whisper and a thought; and she, an apparition. _The ghost of a great dark bird_ , she thought. Death’s favorite form.

But instead of the scheletical form she held in the world above, she was actually making an effort to be seen with her other, truer, face. And the look on that face was far from its usual composed peacefulness.

“Well this is a surprise. Not that you’re not always welcome, but a visit from you this time of the year is rare.” she said lightly as she walked towards her.

Sorrow so rarely touched the face of the Guide of the Dead, but when it did, her Queen knew her well enough to know what put it there.

She sighed. “Did it happen, then?”

Nyssa nodded stiffly. “Yes.”

Felicity sighed deeply and let herself fall heavily on her sofa. “I thought she’d stopped looking for him.”

Thanatos shook her head, the thick dark waves of her hair floating gently as she moved.

“They will always find each other. Even if she doesn’t look. Even though he always forgets. It’s physics.” Nyssa tipped her chin up a little. “It’s the Fates.”

Yes, it was.

Every some millennia or so however, the nymph got it in her head that she didn’t want to let her mortal’s soul go.

Well, that was not accurate. She fought it every time it happened. Fought Death every time as hard as she had that first time, when she’d cheated by breathing a sliver of her immortal soul into a mortal body halfway in the lands of the Underworld - starting what would become a wheel punishment.

But sometimes… sometimes she came up with an actual war to wage, and not just a battle.

This was one of those times, it seemed.

“Did she fight you for him?”

Nyssa’s lips curved upwards. A sad smile. “Harder than ever. But this time it’s different.”

She had already figured. If she settled her mind and reached into the confines of her realm, she could feel him. That one mortal soul that she sometimes escorted to the banks of the Lethe herself. It was hovering now on the shores of the Styx, not in, not out. Waiting.

He couldn’t move.

She opened her eyes and pinned Nyssa with them, a frown pulling her brows together.

“She wants to bargain.” Nyssa explained.

The Queen’s frown deepened. “There is no bargaining with the Fates. What had to be, came to pass and it could not have happened any other way.”

When Nyssa did not reply, Felicity got up and reached forward with both her hands and her mind, encompassed Nyssa’s being, and went back to where Death had last before she came here.

A shivering city, stinking of fear, a crumbled building. A woman who was not a woman at all, crying over the mangled body of her lover, who gave his frail mortal life for hers, without knowing no rock of falling iron could ever kill her. Another man on his knees, just to the other side of the dying mortal, defeated.

A battle. The nymph’s fury smashing against Thanatos’ inexorable will.

And finally an understanding, an exhaustion that overwhelmed pain and grief.

The nymph had made an offer… and offer that was not Nyssa’s to refuse. Nyssa escorted souls. That was her duty. The gates of the underworld were not hers to open or bar to anyone. She was only guardian to the gates of Death.

The Queen let go of Nyssa’s hands with an angry hiss, stepped back. With a wave of her hand she called both the Nymph and the Archer to her as she tried to pace her frustration away in front of the floor-length windows of the loft.

The sun was no comfort.

They appeared behind her in a soft whoosh of air. More than the sound of their coming or their physically being there, the smell of destruction clinging to them made them real. The Queen breathed in the smoke and the blood, the iron bitterness that tinted the air, coming off their skin.

Ares had left his stench on them both.

She turned, arms crossed over her chest, her face expressionless. She disregarded the nymph’s companion, her eyes seeking the other woman’s instead.

Strange, how little she had changed since the first time she stumbled into the underworld, begging for her pain to end.

“Nereid.” The Queen greeted flatly.

The nymph bowed her head, her right hand, knuckles bloody, coming up to touch her heart, in the old greeting of the watery depths she had been born of.

“My Queen.”

Felicity considered her. Her dark hair, pale eyes. Her bruised face, the blood on her. One would think she stood before a goddess of war.

“You go by Daphne’s name these days, don’t you?”

“Yes.” The nymph nodded, arms falling to her sides. “Laurel.”

“I have chosen Felicity, for now.”

The nymph’s eyes were exhausted but she found it in herself to scoff. “You always had a warped sense of humor.”

The Queen smirked a little bit. “I think it suits me.”

But Laurel was not fooled, only amused. “You think it’s funny how little they understand of you.”

The Queen simply shrugged.

She couldn’t deny that backhanded irony at the Olympian’s expense had always been always appealing to her. Mortal’s too, if she were honest, though it was not their fault that they feared the unknown and found her to be the personification of it. Fear of the death was in their nature.

No, the joke was mostly on her family and their family, and their raucous belief that she was the death of every party.

Nyssa found this especially hilarious, as she did the Queen’s penchant for saying the exact wrong thing, always and delighting in the shock it caused.

“Laurel, what are we _doing_ here?” the archer finally asked, voice rough with grief and barely-contained anger.

The Queen’s eyes flickered to him for the first time since he walked in.

As she considered him carefully, she felt that there was something distinctively familiar about him, but between the hood and the paint and the dark shroud around his mind, she couldn’t easily place what. It was a thought that kept dancing just an inch behind her head, unwilling to be caught.

He was not her concern, anyway.

“What I told you we would be doing.” Laurel turned her eyes back to Felicity. “Meeting the ruler of Hades.”

“What?” his eyes turned to Felicity again, words trailing off as he looked again and this time, _saw_.

His eyes – they were very blue, mirror of the sky ( _awareness prickled inside her. She knew him! She_ did _! But from_ where?) – went wide with disbelief. He looked at her from the tip of her strappy sandals to the tip of her blonde hair - and blinked.

Oh, how she liked it. She loved to shock, after all, though she’d been told that made her manner rude.

“I surprise you?” she asked him, mouth curling up in a lopsided smile.

“You’re not… what I expected.” He said lamely, even as his frown at her deepened.

She might have had something funny to say to that, something cutting too perhaps, but his nature intrigued her and distracted her from it. It was just so curious, and she could not resist any mystery. That had ever been her weakness.

He was not mortal. But he was not _other_ , either. Trapped he was, between the two. So strange.

“I disappoint you then?”

“I don’t know.”

The Queen took a step forward, willed her white flowery dress to shift consistence, lengthen. To become a hooded cape of smoke and ash, covering her from the top of her head to the tips of her fingers and toes and fluttering like fog behind her. Every star in the sky shone in its otherworldly fabric as she pushed her aura hard against them both, maybe a little more than necessary, because they _had_ ruined her morning.

Laurel grunted and braced her feet. The arched stumbled back a few steps and reached back for one of his arrows.

“Is _this_ more to your liking?” she asked, her voice deepening through and space, resounding against the frail walls of the loft with the echoes of a countless souls.

The windows shook and the walls vibrated, unable to contain even her smoothest whisper.

He stared, eyes wide. Did not speak.

The Queen let that particular form of hers go and returned to her flowy sundress and heels, folding the threads of her being back onto itself again. She had no shattered a single window in a week and she was not eager to break her lucky streak now.

The archer’s mouth had opened and closed a couple of times and though his hands were limp at his sides, he was fidgeting.

Laurel sighed.

“Oliver, meet Hades Aidoneus Chthonios. Plouton[1], Eubuleus[2], Polydegmon[3]. Goddess of the Dead and ruler of the Other Side.” Laurel introduced flatly, and at that point, unnecessarily.

Felicity raised one eyebrow at her. “You give me my true name and still call me a ‘goddess’. I know you don’t like my kind much, but there’s no need to get cheeky.” Her eyes hardened. “Especially since you’re here to ask for something.”

“My apologies.”

“Save them for when you mean them.” The Queen cautioned.

The nymph clenched her jaw. “I shall.”

“So here you are, and here I am. Ask me.”

It was almost a challenge. The living had come to her before, begging to be let into her realm, so they could carry something out. Sometimes she had let them, most times she had not. The rules of her realm were clear and thought they could be bent, it never lasted, and it never changed the will of the Fates. Not for anyone. Not even for her own self, as she had learned to her sorrow. Death may bend to some – as Nyssa had proved by not dashing Laurel’s hopes immediately, as she could have. Sometimes Nyssa had even allowed a trick or two to slip past her. But the ruler of the Underworld held the balance. She could not afford mistakes and she was not fond of exceptions.

Not even for one stray little nymph, no matter how bright her nature or how fierce her cry.

“I come to beg entrance to the realm of the dead, my Queen.” Laurel said clearly.

“And that is all?”

“That is all.”

She didn’t need a mirror to know the smile on her face was unkind. Her anger always had been. “You want to steal from me, Nereid? You think yourself _that_ clever?”

Laure’s eyes burned, the loss-fueled rage that had carried her to this moment still fresh. “I am no thief.”

“No? Then you must mean to die. For that you don’t need my permission, so you must be asking me to kill you. Which is an exercise in futility, since you know better than anyone that your string is not at an end, Nereid. Not yet. Not for a _long_ time.”

Laurel flinched. She knew her fate - it was close to cruel to remind her. Yet here she was.

Her nature was as predictable as it was chaotic.

The queen sighed and then sat down on one of the plush sofas of her mortal home.

“Do you know why it was Nyssa who came for your beloved, Laurel, and not her more bloodthirsty sisters?”

Pain was in every line of that drawn face, it flooded her eyes and leaked out of her with every shallow breath.

Still, the Nereid answered. “Tommy died in peace.”

The archer’s eyes were wide and shiny. He did not believe it. “Tommy died in pain.” He gritted between tightly clenched teeth, angry still and glaring at Nyssa as if the fault was hers.

For someone who was not quite human, he had an utterly mortal understanding of death, Felicity noted.

“Yes. And yet, he was not alone. Nor unloved.” Nyssa said slowly, speaking for the first time since the other two got there. “Nor did he die in vain.”

“Yes he did.” And this time, Laurel’s refusal was as total as she was about everything else.   

The Queen waved the words away. “No matter the manner of his death, I will not have it undone. Not for you nor for thundering Zeus himself and that is final.” Felicity declared.

But then after a breath, she softened her voice, her eyes. Tried to call understanding forth from the grieving nymph. “Do you really want to keep him from whatever peace he may find in the realm, in a vain battle to assuage your guilt, Nereid?”

The nymph shook her head. “No. I don’t want to keep Tommy from finding rest. I want to find it for the both of us.”

 “You have tried this before. Twice.” The Queen reminded her sternly. “You failed. Twice.”

Laurel’s shoulders slumped, the fight left, and it left her hollow and sad. “I’m not going to fight anymore. I’m going to end it.”

The Queen’s suspicion finally slid in place as smoothly as if it had been hovering just out of her reach all along. “You asked for permission to enter my realm.”

“Yes.”

“But you want to move beyond it.”

Laurel was calm. She was sure. “Yes.”

The queen looked hard at this creature that had survived eons and wars, the rise and fall of Olympus and outlived most of those who had hated her for daring to do what none had before her: challenge the Fates. And there she stood, ready to do it again.

She walked to the nymph, stood right in front of her so close that she could reach and take her hands in both her own. Laurel was taller than her, in this form. Lean and strong, still built more for the water than dry land.

“Do you remember how it happened, Nereid?” the Queen asked softly. “How this started? It’s been so long, but you must remember.”

She _had_ to remember. She had to understand or she would never be free.

But none could _make_ her understand, and after so long, she apparently had not learned.

“I remember I kissed someone, loved him and killed him in the same breath.” Laurel said, as a single tear escaped and fell down her cheek.

Yes, indeed. That is how it had happened. She had been so young, such a lovely soul, awed at all things living. She hadn’t even known what Death was, what fate entailed or its makers. How could she have known what it meant to undo it?

“And brought him to life.” the Queen reminded her. “It was his fate to die that day, but you didn’t let him. His thread had been woven, measured and cut, but you brought him back.”

She had tied the thread of his mortal life back together with part of her own without even realizing what she was doing. And in doing what was forbidden, she had bound him to her forever.

“Aides, please. His soul is more frayed every time I see him. I cannot watch him come undone in front of me.” Her determination colored her words. “I _will_ not.”

She courted the impossible, as always. Without understanding that she would only make things worse.

“The Kingdom of the Moira is kingdom of the limit and the end, Laurel. What is done cannot be undone there.”

The Queen knew this all too well. She had tried herself.

“No. But it can be unmade.” Laure looked up, all water, about to leak to the ground at the slightest touch. “You say it yourself all the time. None of us is really immortal. All of us are at the Moiras hands.”

Laurel tilted her chin up, stubborn, Determined. “I will give them my soul and let it be unmade. I will end, so that he may be free. I did this; _I_ am going to undo it.”

_No, you will only bring more ruin on yourself… and I am a fool for letting you._

Living around shades had made her more human than she ought to be, the Queen thought absently.

But then again she knew it was not so. She knew her reasons and they ran deep, of a hurt that nothing could ever assuage. Loss that still pulsed alive and fresh, from a wound always wet that would never heal, even after eons.

“You never meant to save him.” The archer whispered.

The Queen had almost forgotten about him. But now that she saw him, she did pity him. Understanding dawned on him like a fresh layer of misery, and he swayed on his feet at its weight.

Laurel looked at him, and the sadness in her eyes spanned millennia. “No. I have tried every way to save him. There are none.”

“You lied to me.” Though he couldn’t seem to decide if he was angry or desperate because of it.

His mouth twisted with the former but his eyes swam in the latter.

“I didn’t. I said-”

“ _You said you would fight to free him_!” he yelled, and his anger pushed at the Queen and the Nereid both, as if the brighter his anger, the hotter it burned outwards.

“And I will.” Laurel said calmly.

He shook his head, started pacing up and down, every stop leaving some of his blood behind on her floor. His suit was so dark Felicity hadn’t been able to tell, but he _was_ bleeding.

“You don’t want to bring him back, you want to…”

“I want to release him.” Laurel said simply.

Everything about her juxtaposed everything in him, and he looked at them both as if he was the storm and they were the shore he couldn’t wait to hit.

The Queen couldn’t remember, from the top of her head, the last time someone from the upper world had looked at her without dread.

“Your friend has passed, Archer. Death cannot be reversed.”

“You are the _goddess_ of death. You can do whatever you want!” he hurled the words at her in anger, an accusation, but the next moment he was closer than anyone had dared to come without invitation.

Close enough that for a moment Nyssa stepped forward, her form flickering between the dark-haired maiden and the skeleton mortals saw when she came from them, before remembering there was nothing the Archer could do – his nature close to mortal than deathless – that would ever impact the Queen.

His humanity showed in his eyes, rimmed-red and still shiny with tears, pleading. Nothing of her kind, the queen thought, would ever dare be so open-souled and honest.

“I will give anything.” He whispered fiercely. “ _Everything_. Please…”

The Queen stood there, having to look up to catch his eyes in this form.

“I am sorry, Archer.” And she was surprised to mean it. “But I cannot give back what has been lost to you. It is out of my hands. All I can do is care for your friend’s soul, until he returns again.”

His face contorted in anger and he turned away from her, hands going to his face, heels of his palms pressing against his eyes.

It was such a familiar gesture that for a moment the Queen was not a queen, she was herself, and she was rendered breathless.

“Oliver.” Laurel reached for him, but he passed her by without stopping. He stalked out of the room in big strides, taking with him the stifling press of grief. For a moment Laurel looked like she wanted to go after him, but it passed.

She turned her eyes on Felicity instead. “Will you let me pass, my Queen?”

Felicity sighed. Never had a amore stubborn creature lived than this sea-born nymph. “Nereid… Laurel, why do you think you were punished?”

Laurel frowned, her impatience making her shift her weight from foot to foot, but she answered. “His life was not mine to take. Or give.”

“Yes. And because you are _relentless_.” The Queen reminded her. “The kind of thinking that has driven you to this moment, right here and now, was the same one that drove you to your fate.”

She stepped closer to Laurel and looked deep into those changeable eyes, as grey as a storm one moment, as clear as the sea in the shallows the next, and wished she could will the nymph to understand.

“Until you learn, it will never stop. Your beloved will walk the underworld without peace, let go of his memories and live again, only as long as he did that first time you killed him, and die, over and over again. You must _relent_ , Laurel.”

But the smile on the other woman’s lips was not one of understanding. It was one of surrender.

“I cannot.” She glanced at Nyssa, and then back at the queen. “None of us can. Creatures like us don’t… bend, we don’t learn. We may not be immortal, but we just _are_ , like rocks.”

“That is no true, my friend.”

Laurel’s smile contained a sadness that spanned eaons. Two full tears fell down her cheeks, cutting a path through the blood and grime on her skin. “You are a Chonian. Perhaps this, as all else, is different for you. But I am a creature of the living world, daughter of the sea and blood of the Olympians. You better than anyone know their unchangeable nature.

“So you see, my Queen, I can no more learn to be different from what I am, than the sun can learn to shine in the underworld… and I think you know that _that_ is the true measure of my punishment.”

The Queen stepped closer, took Laurel’s face in both her hands and made her lean in, touching their foreheads together.

Because so it was, and if the Nereid could see the truth of her own self, then she understood the ways around her curse better than the Queen had given her credit for. Better, even, than the Nereid gave herself credit for.

Perhaps she had a chance after all.

“Very well. So be it.” The Queen said softly as she leaned in, placing a kiss on the other woman’s lips, as light as the touch of a flower’s petal.

In her mind, she opened the way for Laurel’s living soul to cross over to the other side, where no living belonged. And it was so that the Nereid slipped through her fingers with a whisper, leaving nothing of herself behind but for the smell of the destruction that had brought her here.

The Queen sighed, her shoulders falling.

“May the light of the creators protect you.” she murmured, eyes still closed, brushing the tips of her fingers together.

“This is the second time you have sided against the Fates, Aides.” Nyssa reminded her. “I am… concerned.”

She turned to where Nyssa was still standing, motionless as only she could be.

“Why? Don’t you remember what they teach us: anything that must happen, shall happen, and it cannot happen any other way.” The Queen said  with a hint of mischief. “Even when it works against the will of the Fates. They are not the highest manifestation of destiny.”

She looked down to the sprawling city beneath her, busting with life.

“Sometimes I think there is no destiny. That there is only what is written in our bodies and our will to guide us.”

“Your thoughts never did you any favors.” Nyssa scoffed.

That too made the Queen smile. “No, I suppose not.”

-

That night, she fell asleep in her own bed, in her own realm. She laid her head on her pillow and was so tired that she hardly felt Hypnos’ kiss on her forehead. She was there one moment and gone the next, to the realm of dreams, where everything was smoke and visions.

Someone of her nature knew how to walk these stranger lands better than most, but Morpheus was not one to be controlled and he made his realm as changeable as he was himself.

The Queen was not surprised though, when she was visited that night by the same promise that had come to her so many times before.

He was always faceless, sometimes even shapeless, but he always embraced her as a lover. And in her dreams, she went to him easily. No reserve or doubts, because in the land between sleep and awakening, his soul was as familiar to her as her own, more memory than dream, but not real enough to hurt.

The warmth of him was what she felt first, always. He felt real even in a land as ephemeral as this, because even here he was warm.

When his arms came around her, she was happy to know that this time, he would not be formless.

He was tall. When she tilted her head up, her lips brushed his chin, and it made her smile. This time too, when he leaned down to kiss her, it felt as if she had been made for that moment. She tilted her head and deepened their kiss, letting go of past and memories and existing just for his lips on her and how they made her feel.

He’d been her companion for so long that he felt familiar now, her mind so attuned to this particular creation, that he even felt like he was not born from her. Like he was his own being, here at his own will. But she still kissed him as if none of that mattered.

And it didn’t. She was always wary of admitting it when she woke, how easily she believed her own deception in these dreams… but she did.

In her dreams, he felt real. And the way she arched into his hands as if she couldn’t bear to be without them when they traveled up her back, up her spine, to her face - that was real too. She felt his warmth, his weight, pressing her against her own bed. The heat of him between her legs felt real and it made her _need_ … need that was alive and made her thighs shake, sparks of an incoming storm tightening low in her belly, liquefying lower. She ran her hands up his hack, felt his skin - smooth and not, in patches - as if he’d lived as long as she’d lived of a life of his own. As if he had history. The shape of him…

He kissed a devastating path down her neck and stayed there, kissing behind her ear and in that soft place just beneath it, until she flipped him to his back and pressed them together, bare to each other, holding him still with her thighs.

And he wrapped his arms around her then, and held her so tight… She could feel him, pressed against her belly, and if she moved just right-

But his kisses kept distracting her. His mouth opened to hers, inviting her in to taste him deep, slow, the way she wanted to have him, feel him. She was aching for it with such sweet need she thought she would go mad for the want of it.

The room spun and so did she, her back against the bed again. This game between them went always like this, it made her smile against his lips.

She could feel it, her existence tilting on its axis just as she opened her eyes, so close to his face they were nose to nose… and met blue. Blue as crystal, as limpid as the sky.

Blue as spring.

Felicity jerked back so harshly that she might have woken, at any other time. But she did not…

Her heart was drumming against her ribs, relentless, her eyes unable to leave his face, his body relaxed on her bed, as if his home was right there between her bed and the cradle of her thighs.

His smile…

_No…_

This was no ordinary dream. I could not be. It did not answer to her at all, though she had not noticed until she’d tried to grasp at it. _He_ did not answer to her. He just took her face gently in his hands, thumbs brushing her cheekbones, his smile so soft, and she… she was overwhelmed, her chest tightening with it.

She didn’t know anymore if he was her dream - or of she was his.

‘ _You_ _know how to find me._ ’ He said, voice soft, eyes softer. Familiar… ‘ _You know what you have to do._ ’

‘ _You are lost to me, my love. You have been for a long time. Why torment me like this?_ ’

But she knew he was not to blame. It was her own mind that sometimes turned on her.

‘ _I’m not. I’m here. I’m waiting for you. I’ve been waiting for so long, my love.’_

She startled, looked at him a long time, searching for his face through the mist of her dream, trying to push it away to see him again. To understand what this vision was.

It felt like truth.

She leaned into him, touched the tips of her fingers to his cheek, amazed and afraid. She breathed in, it caught on the way out. She was shaking and she only realized it when she saw her trembling fingers reach up to wrap around one of his wrists tightly.

This was no ordinary dream and - he never had been.

‘ _Where are you?_ _Right now where are you? I will come to you, tell me. Tell me._ ’

He smiled. Oh, it was so sweet.

‘ _Find me, Aristi._ ’ And his smile widened then, his eyes shone with amusement and pride. _‘If you wear the name_ _Hades Aidoneus as well as you claim, you will_ _find me._ ’

She startled awake so violently that the vases in the room shattered with the riptide of her emotions, and the mirror cracked too, before she could reign herself in. She was covered in sweat, her sheets wrapped around her legs, uncomfortably wet and so unsatisfied she was still shaking, her skin tingling with awareness of him… everywhere.

She bit her lip and she could swear, she could almost taste him.

But how…

It _couldn’t_ be. She’d always thought… She’d thought she’d dreamed him up, because she was lonely and because she was sad, and because he was never more than a shade in a dream.

It _couldn’t_ be real!

But then she remembered. Those eyes and that strange nature, neither here nor there.

_What are you?_

Felicity fell back on the bed with a barely contained scream. But it only kept building, so she stopped bothering and let it out.

“ _Fuck_!”

* * *

[1] Giver of Wealth

[2] Giver of good council

[3] Reciever of many


	7. Nyssara Mythology au (Hades x Persephone)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a '5 headcanons' ask about the pairing and the universe that got... ridiculously out of hand.

A long time ago, of such distance back in time that, in that day, legends were already old, the Olympians gathered in revolt against their ruling father, the Titan Cronus and his armies. They fought and they won - and it was an the discovery of a secret thread of destiny that saved them. Hades had not joined the battle at first. She did not believe either side was right. But then Zeus promised her that which she had always lived without: the missing part of her soul. One that would be born of him and his future wife. Their daughter. She would come to the world and when she did, if Zeus was not the one ruling the heaves, she would not live long. So Hades accepted. She joined the titanomachia. She fought. She won. And then retired to rule the Underworld and imprison in the depths of his realm the remaining Titans waiting for time when Zeus’s daughter would ascend to her full power as a goddess. 

Demeter accepted too - and then rescinded her acceptance, when Zeus married Hera instead of her. At the end of the war. She hid her daughter away and kept her from coming into her powers for eons on end.

Until it was impossible to do so. 

Even the Gods are not beyond the power of the fates.

* * *

Demeter - or, as she is known in these days, Dinah - keeps her daughter from her destiny because she thinks Kore’s destiny will be her death. Dinah is afraid of Hades, you see. She fears and hates the Daughter of Darkness even though it was the blade of the very same that saved ehr life when she was besieged in her little island. She remembers how Hades looked, cutting her way through the battlefield, how the rage overtook her and the joy she found in the killing. She is afraid of Hades’ brutality, of her dreary appearance, of the black cloud that she weaves her tunics with. Of the black beasts she calls horses and that she used to ride into battle. Of the pleasure she seemed to take in bloodletting. Oh how the dark terrible and red she had seemed when she walked in, covered in blood and filth and declared the field take. How ruthless her pursuit and annihilation of the enemy, those poor souls. 

Demeter fears Hades because Hades’ heart is as dark as her kingdom, and she will condemn herself and the world entire to eternal suffering before she allows her daughter to suffer at the hands of such a brute.

* * *

No matter how hard Dinah tried to hide Sara, how hard she tried to keep her daughter away from anything having to do with death and what laid beyond it, her daughter knew. and destiny was not to be evaded. No matter where she went and what flowers she learned to create, her favorite always remained the wood roses*. (Hades’ flower)

* * *

Sara grows up sheltered and happy. An eternal child, just the way her mother likes her. Her mother, who always calls her Kore. A maiden forever. Sara grows tired of it sooner, mush sooner than anyone would have expected. She sneaks away from her mother’s watchful eyes, seeking her own adventures and making her own mischief. 

One of these adventures ends at sea in a storm, with a human that knows nothing of her true nature and that understands only her pretty smiles. She can’t make things grow in front of him, but he is pleasant and he is charming…and then the world is ending and there is only darkness.

Nyssa can feel it when Sara’s heart falls. it pulls at her: makes her feet move, makes her heart beat, as real as hands pulling her by the hair to her chariot. As real as fear pounding the back of neck. She feels Sara’s feeble nature trapped between a god and something less and how close Death is to the thread of her beloved’s life. She feels anger hot enough to burn through all living things that her mother has allowed this perpetual state of limbo to persist on one such as Sara, who was born to gods and men alike. And she knows, she _knows_ that death in the dark waters of the ocean is not Sara’s fate. But she knows fear too. Colder than she has ever known. 

So she rides to the surface faster than she ever has, and before Sara can fall to darkness, Nyssa catches her. 

* * *

What was it? Was it the first time she held her destiny in her arms? Was it the moment she saw that face, those hair of gold, those fin-boned hands? Was it when her blue eyes opened and fell on hers? How was it possible that she had perennially walked creation thinking she was fulfilled - that she could never want for anything - and then, in one blink, feel that change. Feel it shift as clearly as the floor tilting, though it did not. Could not. She’d been sitting at the side of the bed, so respectably far from the woman laying in it that Sara had to crawl to her side, slowly, as if hypnotized. 

She’d smiled and Nyssa could have sworn she had lived the thousands of years before just for breathing the air around this one person now. Just for this and nothing else. 

‘You’re here.’ Sara said, her eyes shiny with all the emotions that made her reach for a stranger’s face, who was no stranger at all. ‘I’ve dreamt about you for so long.’

* * *

The world did not end. It was remade. 

But Sara’s heart was too big to love only one person. As vast and deep as the love of her wife was, when she was crowned with a wreath of lilies and lavenders, Queen of the Underworld, there was room in her heart for more. She loved her mother still, and her mother hurt.  

And if it had been her happiness alone that she would have had to sacrifice to this, she would not have thought on it so long. But the thought of taking peace from the one she loved… it made her heart bleed. The thought of leaving Nyssa’s side, of nights empty of her warmth and her stories and her smile, away where her voice whispering ‘beloved’ in her ear would not reach her… no, Sara did not want to go. She had found love here, in this world without a sun, and she had found herself too, in the gardens of the Underworld. She had become something else than what she was when she first came to this place and that too was part of her. 

She had become whom she had always meant to be. 

And that woman could not cocoon herself in her own happiness and become selfish and blind in it. Not even for the one she loved the most. There was a whole world suffering, up above. She could not stand the hunger in the eyes of the souls that kept descending to her kingdom. It was her fault. She had to undo the hurt, soothe her mother’s heart. 

She had known this before Hermes descended to her home and ordered her to leave it. 

It still hurt. 

But Sara knew then when she looked into Nyssa’s eyes, that though she might need to leave, but she would never change. Gods cannot undo their becoming. Their growth. She could not unmake that part of her that was now ruler, queen… reborn. 

* * *

Nyssa takes her hand, links her long fingers through her beloveds and leads her down secret paths. She has known such violence in her time, such death. she has tried to give peace to those that come to her realm’s door, she has tried to be just. 

But in this, she will be selfish. 

For why should she be lesser than others? Why should she abandon that which most matters? Why should she live without her love? None should have the power to separate that which lives of a life of its own and blooms as beautiful as the love between her beloved and her, even here, where nothing else dares to bloom. Even here, without the sun to help it grow, without anything else like it all around. 

No, she shall not. 

That is what she is thinking when she drops the pomegranate seeds in her beloved’s hand and closes her fingers around them gently 

Sara’s eyes ask her for an explanation. 

‘You have gifted me with a rare and beautiful feeling.’ Nyssa explains, threading her fingers through Sara’s golden hair, bright enough to be the sun of this kingdom without light. ‘I am now gifting you with something just as precious. Choice.’

It had been harder than Nyssa had thought. The hardest thing she’d ever done, in truth. She is not so ashamed of herself not to admit that she had thought of trickery. Love such as this had never touched her before, she will to the unimaginable, it seems, to keep it. But then Sara had turned in her eyes and smiled at her so sweetly, kissed her honestly and with passion that had brought tears to Nyssa’s eyes. 

There would be no lies between them. No games. There would be only truth. And if her beloved chooses to leave her, then so be it. 

Something so bright and live was never meant to be kept where it did not wish to say. Not even Hades has that power. 

* * *

There are a thousand years in the moments during Sara’s eyes stare at the seeds and she decides what she will do. Nyssa knows terror of the kind that melts the heart and the bones. She shakes and wishes to cry, feels her heart shred down the middle, every battle wound she’s ever taken opening at once all over her. 

Sara looks up.

‘Wait.” Nyssa takes her by the shoulders, starling her with the desperation in her voice. ‘Wait.’

And she kisses her then. One last kiss, for love’s sake. One last kiss, for life and spring, for the blood that ran hot between them and all the beautiful things they made and how they changed each other, and all the temples that should be built to these wonders.

One last kiss.

* * *

Sara eats the seeds all at once. She waits for Nyssa to step away from her. Waits for her dark and lovely beloved to open her eyes so that the tenderness of her soul may shine through them. She waits for Nyssa to see and understand that this is not impulsive. this is not her kiss or pity, not even love. 

This is choice. 

* * *

Sara fell into the darkness and into Nyssa’s waiting arms. Kore walked into the underworld, wide eyed and amazed at all she beheld.

Persephone, the Reborn, its ruler, walks out.


	8. Canarrow soulmates-reincarnation au

She doesn’t always remember. In fact, most of the time she starts out just like him: with no memory and just a deep need to be close to him. Around him. In his life somehow.

She doesn’t know what it is about the distance, the concept of it, the applied practice closing it. No distance between the two of them - _that_ is her default, the natural setting of her brain, her body’s chemistry.

So many times she’s cursed it. But being around him – it makes things sharper. Makes them clearer.

Being around him makes her remember.

She doesn’t ever remember everything. It scares her, and she’s tried to fix it, but nothing ever works. What comes back to her is not one stream of events that make sense, but rather, a broke row of pearls she has to gather one by one from the ground, under chairs, under furniture. Never in order. Never knowing how to put them together. Always lacking the clasps, a piece, something.

So many times she’s grown tired of this endless, fractured existence. Wished that out of all her memories, she would retain just this one: stay away from him. But she never does. It’s impossible. Knowing her, that would be even counterproductive. She’s always done what others told her not to. It somehow makes all forbidden things twice as attractive in her eyes.

The only things worth having are the ones that leave you breathless, right?

If she could flip the bird at herself, she would. She does, internally.

_Fuck you._

As if that wasn’t how this all started.

( _she’s lying, she doesn’t remember how it started. But it must have been because of her_.)

When she remembers, it’s always different. Sometimes it all hits her at once. Sometimes it feels like going insane. Sometimes she screams. It depends on the life she’s had. Sometimes she’s young. That one time she was old and grey and they found each other on a ship that sank, died out there in the freezing water, holding out to each other.

This time, she’s half drunk and pukes on his shoes. Awesome first impression.

-

Her knees brush his from where they’re sitting, chairs facing each other, too close together. She leans forward a bit, looks into his eyes, tries to understand.

_‘do you know me? can you see me?’_

He doesn’t, of course. It’s in his nature to forget, as it is in hers to remember.

His smile is boyish. He is as handsome as ever, the way he looks at her so uncomplicated by guilt. Why is he always handsome? Why is she always so reckless? Is it part of his arrogance? Is it part of her doom? She thinks the things that they retain in each and every life are actually the things that they are being punished for, but she cannot know that either. She doesn’t remember.

And what she does remember she wishes she could forget.

So she leans even further and whispers at him. ‘Come a little closer, Ollie. I got a secret to tell ya.’

And she kisses him.

It’s the same thing.

-

The first years after her lives come back to her are the hardest, always. A thousand people live under her skin and yet she is still just one. It makes her head funny, sometimes.

There are times when she burns, from the inside, the want of a thousand years accumulating and melting into her. Her body is not prepared to handle it, and she is almost a slave to it.

But she doesn’t think that is the reason she fucks him in the back of his car that night that they went to the movies. She just wanted him, and he wanted her and it was rally that simple. Nothing to it.

But the way her world goes quiet, that is new. Her thoughts calm down and she remembers then that this will get better. This will get calmer. It won’t always be like this, a thousand lives into one, wanting him from a million directions with the strength of so many people.

It will be just them, soon.

He kisses up her neck and then reaches her mouth and this, this kiss, is calmer than all that came before it. It stills and quietens all around her and she can only feel the warmth and promise of him, and of all that they are meant to be and it is beautiful.

She doesn’t remember when they promised to be each other safety, but of all the fragments of her many stories, this is the one that least matters. 

-

Out of all the lives she remembers, this might be the  strangest, Sara thinks as Oliver takes the gun from her hand and shoots Ivo without blinking. But somewhere inside her she knows this is not true. Things come back the more she lives and by now she knows she has always been a warrior, in one way or another. And so has he.

They had always known death, the both of them. They have kissed her lips like old friends and smiled, unafraid. But though she may remember this, Oliver doesn’t. And yet he is so still in front of murder, in front of blood and death and violence now. His hand doesn’t shake and neither does his voice and Sara may not be afraid of death but she is afraid of this. She feels what he feels. She is joyful when he is happy and she is desperate when he is sad and that is how their world turns. So when he kills someone to keep her hands clean, and she feels nothing, Sara is wants to fall to her knees.

‘My love, my love...’ the words come to her foreign and real and true. Her love is too deep for one life and so is her grief. ‘What is happening to your heart? How have I failed to protect you this time?’

-

She who knows no fear. It’s what they used to call her, sometimes. She remembers this when she jumps from a cliff with Slade at her back and lands on a ship. But she knows that was never the truth. She’s known fear of the same depths as her every other feeling. And she always feels things as far as they go, so she knows that she has known true terror in all her lives. She is always afraid, for instance, when he dies before her, or when she leaves him alone to follow.

They are never well without the other.  It is a sad truth but they cannot be kept apart. Not even by death.

They chase it sometimes. They both have so many times, pushing its black veil aside almost as if it were a vexing thing, and finding each other again, before being torn apart and shoved into new lives, new beginnings, all over again.

Never to rest. Never to stop.

No, she’s not afraid of death, but she is afraid of what it leaves behind.

And when she falls through the freighter and into the coldest water she has ever felt, she is mostly sad.

‘How will you be without me? Are you going to follow me? Don’t. Don’t follow me.’ And with the same breath... ‘Please come after me.

Not even she wants to be alone.

-

She watches the freighter sink from the shore and she cries and cries until she cant anymore.

The rest is haze, it’s memory. It’s biding time until time stops being. She lives, she breathes. She is saved, she trains, she kills. It’s so easy, it should frighten her. But grieving through time and space is not easy thing to live through and sometimes you have to stop feeling things to get to the other side of them.

She doesn’t know how she manages to survive, to keep breathing. Sometimes the whole notion of it becomes unbearable and she wants to step off the highest balcony of Nanda Parbat and let the void embrace her. It would be so easy.

But she cant do that either.  She cannot, it’s so simple. She doesn’t even know why. She just cant make that jump, cant let this body die.

So she keeps it surviving.

She manages to even live a little. Finds a spark of meaning in a world of darkness, on someone else’s lips. Finds love again...

It’s happened before. She has loved other people. While he was alive, after he’d died. Before him and after him she has lived. But this time it’s more than that. This time is a thread she holds on to, tries to find her own sanity. Tries to find her feet.

And she does.

The moment she hears he is alive, it all clears up and she knows how she managed to keep breath. The moment she learned that the world almost crumbled under him, under those that are her family and that she loves as deeply as she’s loved her every family, she knows she has to go back.

-

She knows why she didn’t die. Why she couldn’t.

Because he hadn’t.

_And we cannot leave this world without the other, can we?_

-

He’s surrounded himself with people who love him, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. In all the world. This is how he was mean to be, how he was meant to live and for a moment, despite all that they have been through and all the ways they have fond each other, Sara is afraid. She’s afraid that she will ruin it, that she will mass things up. That he will notice and resent her. That he won’t want her.

She tries leaving. Just once, she tries leaving him behind again.

She cant.

So she gives him a choice. Catch her, see her face. Decide. Make up his own mind.

-

He decided the moment he saw who it was beneath that mask.

She knew it. She felt it.

-

Darkness clings. She’s walked further into it in this life than in many others, but she cannot shake the taint of death off this time. It’s gone too deep, hurt too hard.

She’s scarred, grown new. She is ashamed of what she has become.

Was she ever so cruel, before?

Of course she was.

Of course...

But she says anyway. She cannot leave this place. Home has found her.

-

It’s like the first time: hot and frantic, skin to skin with their hands everywhere and their mouths following, unable to get enough of each other. The more they are together the more hectic the feeling gets. Out of control, like a storm.

God, the relief... the end of that aching feeling hollowing her out. Finally, finally.

They kiss and kiss and then she rolls them around and everything starts all over again, calmer this time, slower, and its exactly as it was meant to be.

Here. Together, in the quiet with each other. Everything else is memory.

-

“You remember, don’t you?”

They’re turned towards the other, and he’s close enough that his nose touches the tip of hers. She passes a hand through his hair, pulls a little.

His eyes are so sad.

Maybe this is why he doesn’t remember. Oliver doesn’t know how to let go of the past. It drowns him.

She wonders how he’s survived it.

“Yeah, I remember.”

“How much?”

He shrugs one shoulder, traces the line of her spine like he’s reading her history on her bones and her skin.

“Not much. Enough to think I  was going insane.”

Yeah...

“When did it happen?”

“Russia. I think... I was with someone. I think he looked like you, but... not _this_ you. He...”

Sara knew what had happened. She knew it from his voice, his face, the look in his eyes.

“I killed everyone.” He says then, his voice steadier, colder, though his hands never stop their pattern-less journey on her skin. This is steady ground for him now. How far apart they’ve been, they almost lost each other out there.

But no... that too is impossible.

“Everyone in the building, everyone who arranged it, everyone who profited from it. They caught me, eventually. Dropped me back on Lian Yu as punishment.”

She lets that sit for a while. Remembers that one time when they were both girls and went picking flowers together, read poetry to each other. That time that had one kiss, and then they were killed for it. But another time they escaped and lived their whole lives in the mountains, before they were found.

Tragedy. That too seems to seep into their every life.

“Is it always like this?” Oliver asks suddenly, anguish plain on his face. For a moment she is confused. “I feel like every time... every time it’s the same story.”

They are born, they find each other, love each other with the passion of the sun and then lose each other. To violence, to death, to suffering. And all over again.

Futility in action.

“I think so, yes.”

The look on his face is wrecked, and Sara hates herself. Hates this person she has become that can drop death with the same ease as read a newspaper, hates this life and what it made her, and wishes it were over so they can start again as newer, better selves.

That never happens. They’re never better. This is what they are.

“Why?”

She doesn’t know why. She’s never known why.

Sara sits up, turns away from him and lets her head fall on her hands.

“I think... I think we did something horrible, a long time ago. Something so horrible that... that nobody was left to forgive us.”

Tears that don’t belong to this moment, regret so deep it cuts right through her like a rusty blade, makes her shake.

Oliver tries to turn her around and when she does not give, he steps in front of her instead. She can imagine him sitting there without seeing him. In her minds’ eye, she pictures him perfectly, shaking his head silently at her, confused and itching on desperate. He doesn’t understand and she has no answers. They’re stuck. In this life as they always have been in all the others. It feels like everything is different but even she can tell, with the little she knows of their past selves, that nothing is truly changed. This cures is forever.

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

She doesn’t remember that.

“What happened? Why is this happening?”

“I don’t _know_ , alright!” She yells at him and gets up, paces, utterly unashamed of her nakedness. She walks away from him and jumps in the shower without waiting for the water to warm up.

She hates cold water.

In the League they used to dunk the initiates in freezing tubs and leave them there as an exercise. She killed someone for not letting her get out of them, one time.

Ra’s once looked into her eyes and stared for long moments. She’d been surprised. Curious to know what he’d seen that would give him that kind of pause. How much he’d seen.

‘You have an old soul’ he’d said, as if to himself. ‘far too old.’

She had been beyond his understanding. Sometimes she was even beyond her own.

Like now for instance. Countless lives spent hurdling towards each other and all Sara wants to do now is pack up and leave. Run. Go as far from him as she can get and stay there and see if life is not easier that way. She’d missed him as if he were a phantom limb – and in so many ways that is exactly what they are to each other: a nameless hurt that you feel even after the loss. Something that will always be part of her. But things were so simple when they were apart.

Now everything is too sharp.

When she gets out, he’s wearing his sweats and sitting on his bed. She knows what he’s going to say before it ever comes out of his mouth.

In this relationship, she’s always been the one that holding time against them.

“I’m not giving up.”

Sara smiles, but it’s sad. She comes to sit by his side, thighs touching.

“You always say that, you know. Somehow, out of all the random pieces of all the many you-s that survive, this is always one of them.”

Her eyes land on him heavy as a brick.

“You never give up. You always want to _fix it_.”

“I’m not going to sit here waiting for you to die. Or for me to die and leave you alone.”

He’s angry. He’s always so angry. Why does he always live like the world owes him something?

“It’s how everyone else lives their lives.”

But he just shakes his head.

“We could run away.” He looks so hopeful, so ready. It breaks her heart to say no.

It’s senseless to say now – why should she? Everything in their existence has always been temporary but each other.

“We could do whatever we wanted to.”

“There’s no running from this, Oliver. What would we even be running from? Life?”

“Death.”

It rings so true, she has no idea where he got it from, but she knows it’s true.

She shakes her head anyway.

“There’s no running from that. Don’t you remember?” She leans into him, palms the back of his head to being him closer, touch ehr forehead to his.

“We invented Death.” She tells him, like a secret. He flinches, eyes wide, but she doesn’t let him go, not with her hand holding on to the back of his neck nor with her eyes trapping his. “We killed all the gods, and _this_... this is what’s left. And we have a long way to go, Oliver.”

Her hands falls to where his heart is beating a frantic rhythm, and rests there.

“Do you ever make it past 30?” his voice is soaked in tears, so she just closes her eyes and kisses him instead.

‘ _Come here, I got a secret to tell ya._ ’


	9. Olicity Matrix AU

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i cant seem to quit this movie, im so sorry, but an olicity one had to happen

She is… _irritatingly_ chaotic. Even through a feed, it annoys him. Her apartment is a mess and she never seems to care. The bed is that thing she bumps into on her way to the bathroom, her clothes are on never-ironed piles in her closet, it’s a small miracle how she ever finds anything in that bomb-site she calls worktable and Oliver would bet his right arm she couldn’t be fucked to find two socks that match .

But for all the chaos she lives in, her hacking is… the best world Oliver can find for it is ‘elegant’, which isn’t the kind of word he’d ever think of associating with an angry 24 year that uses every variation of the word ‘fuck’ so much that at this point it’s just a warning that a noun is going to follow, but that’s how it is.

At first sight she would seem unassuming: typical kid with an attitude going through a goth phase.

Once he starts tracking her movements in the web though, he thinks it’s a wonder how she made it alive this long. Especially after that incident with the virus she and her boyfriend released a year ago. ( _Oliver wonders for a moment if that was what put her on Digg’s radar, at first_.) She is good at keeping her head down, but once you focalize on her, it becomes rather obvious that she is naturally gifted.

She is not the first gifted kid he’s seen since he got out, of course. She is not even the most gifted he’s seen. Which is how everyone on the ship knows that her talent is not the reason Dig is so sure she is the one. Even if Oliver didn’t know John as well as he does, he has been trained out of trusting the obvious years ago.

As First Mate, he is responsible for the first background searches on the coppertops they free and that includes the ones Digg thinks are special. So he makes a file out of her every hack from when she started till now and the reality of what he finds is almost… amusing.

The truth of Felicity Smoak is hidden in the details, of you know where to look. And Oliver does.

He has no idea how she does it, what patterns she sees that nobody else can, but she seems to be able to find original, simple solutions to even the most complex systems, in a way that Oliver, even after years in the academy, still can’t replicate with ease. She changes handles every now and then, never leaves footprints in her work and seems as utterly uninterested with building a reputation as she is in keeping an organized apartment. But she doesn’t realize that her style is still very distinctive. Oliver finds himself smiling, looking over her data. It’s as if her hacking has a sense of humor. The shortcuts she takes, the little lines of code that line up one after the other, almost unassuming, until she breaks through.

Her style is not polished – she improvises too much and seeming too randomly for that - but clean nonetheless. It’s as if she can see a problem and immediately know what is essential from what is not, which at times makes her hacks so minimalistic, that most would confuse her for a beginner.

But she’s not. Unassuming power seems to be the true measure of her genius.

When he understands that, Oliver understands how she is still alive, even after what happened. And that they need to get her out, because she is getting to that point where those like her usually make the kind of mistakes end up getting them killed.

He leans forward a bit, watches the code on the screens fall relentlessly, and wonders if she’s lonely the way he used to be. If she’s sad and misses her boyfriend. If she even remembers to miss him, to grieve for him, and if it scares her that she doesn’t. When the last time she spoke to her mother was, and if she can even manage to feel guilt about it.

She doesn’t. And whenever she does, she avoids it by starting to code again. He knows that, just like he knows that she can spend days at a time without saying a single word, nailed in front of her computer. She’s at a point where everything else but the search in the depths of the dark net feels pointless.

Oliver has seen this before. He’s felt it.. He remembers the relentlessness of those last months. The cognitive dissonance, the isolation, the depression. The unreal feeling of the world, the anger. The _hunger_ \- for something that felt real in a world where dreams seemed to have more substance than the waking hours. That small voice has whispered in the back of his head just the way it’s probably whispering in then back of hers: ‘your world isn’t real’.

She is searching for why, and even though she doesn’t know what she is going to find, it doesn’t make her stop.

He wonders if she will be ready when the answer finds her.

He wasn’t. When he first woke, he thought he’d finally died and gone to hell. And when he’d realized he hadn’t, he had wanted to die and just make it all stop.

But he hadn’t. He’d lived.

_She won’t be like you._

After all, nobody was quite like him. Oliver didn’t go looking for the Matrix. It just happened. His brain broke, he thinks sometimes, and that is why he became aware of reality distorting itself around him. Like a high tension power line releasing sparks where the conduct has been damaged.

Oliver lets out a long breath and turns away from the Matrix feed.

Knowing what Digg has in mind for her, sometimes Oliver wonders if getting her out is even a mercy. She could be the one, and fuck if the thought doesn’t make his palms sweat even in the cold of the main deck and his heart beat faster. But Digg could be wrong. And they could end up killing her too, just like the others before her.

The thought makes him look at the Matrix feed again and he calls himself a fucking idiot when he realizes that he just needs to make sure she’s still there. She is. She fell asleep on her workstation again, folded on her arms, hair all over her face and headphones askew. He thinks back at the hours he’s spent tracking her, studying her file. At the shifts he takes when he doesn’t have to because fuck Isabel, but she is right, he does like watching her work. He likes the way she makes him feel like they’re having a conversation even as she moves around her stupid apartment, talking to herself. She likes her bursts of creativity, and how she types and how her personality bursts in the way she talks, no matter how quiet she is.

_Fuck. Fuck!_

Oliver presses the tips of his fingers against his eyes.

“Jesus.”

He doesn’t know. And what he believes doesn’t matter. She could be the one. Or she could be like all the rest of them. It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t know anything for sure other than she is human, and she is desperate to be free. And that is what they are out here to do.

-

Her studio apartment is a small hole-in-the-wall in the outskirts of Boston, overgrown with technology.  Weed-like cables coil everywhere, duck taped into thickets that wind up and around the legs of several desks shoved together. The tabletops are filled with cannibalized equipment that lays open like autopsied corpses. Radios, surveillance equipment, computer parts. Even the fucking toaster was sacrificed at one time.

Felicity had fallen asleep last night right at the middle of her technological rat’s nest, running a search program in the depths of the dark net. Her head is pillowed on her arms, headphones askew and her black curls covering half her face. Her programs are still running as she sleeps, when the screen of her computer goes blank.

A command writes itself out on the screen just as she tarts to stir.

_‘Wake up, Felicity.’_

Felicity takes a deep breath and pries one eye open, before sitting up, one eye still closed and yawning.

“Ugh god, _such_ a bad idea.” She whispers to herself as she winces and wipes the bit of drool on the side of her mouth with the back of her hand. She rubs her eyes, smudging the black makeup even more and is in midst stretch, wincing at her back cricks, when she notices the screen of her computer.

She frowns. Presses ‘CTRL X’ but, on the screen, the letter ‘A’ appears.

Felicity frowns.

“…The fuck?”

She tries pressing the ‘Esc’ key but nothing happens. She pulls her chair closer to the table, cracking her knuckles before setting to work.

“Whoever you are, I’m gonna find you, asshole.”

It’s not a game though, because whoever hacked her must have some serious skill to get past the mother of all encryptions that she set her system up with. Especially since whoever this is knows her actual name, which is too creepy to contemplate at the moment.

She starts typing, but the screen doesn’t respond and just as she’s about to disconnect the whole system and take her computer apart, a message is typed out on the screen as if her PC had a mind of its own.

_‘They’re watching you.’_

Her fingers freeze, heart pounding against her ribs.

“What?”

Her voice comes out in a rough whisper that grates against her own ears, much too slow for how fast her thoughts are going.

The letters appear, following each other like fifth graders holding each other’s hands, melting into words.

_‘Follow the white rabbit’_

A litany of curses starts mixing with her dread, because what the literal fuck! She tries not to panic; she really does, but then-

_‘Knock, knock, Felicity.’_

When someone knocks on her door for real, she almost jumps out of her chair.

Whoever is on the other side of the door keeps knocking and when she turns back to her computer, the screen is back to her normal searches. It’s as if none of it ever happened and she was having a particularly vivid dream.

Felicity closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

“Fuck!”

She gets up, still unnerved by the whole thing and trying to shake it off in the five steps that it takes her to get to the door.

“Who is it?”

A familiar voice on the other side answers her.

“It’s Nate.”

Felicity curses under her breath and then calls herself an idiot. She undoes all four of the locks that keep her front door shut, but leaves the chain in.

Nate is on the other side, with several of his friends. He smiles at her, amused.

“You look like hell.”

Felicity gives him a deadpan stare. “You’re two hours late.”

He winces. “Sorry, her fault.”

He nods to the girl on his arm, who looks at Felicity up and down and smiles slow.

Felicity looks back at him, face utterly impassive. “You have the money?”

“Yes.”

Nate passes her an envelope through the cracked door.

“Hold on.” Felicity closes the door on them and looks inside, counts it quickly. All two grand are in there. She throws the envelope her bed and starts rummaging on the mess that is her table for one particular book.

Her hand catches on a crumpled letter and she picks it up, not remembering opening it last night. She takes a closer look at Queen Consolidated job offer and then rolls her eyes, throwing it in the trash, where it can keep company to the same offers made by Wayne Enterprises, STAR Labs, and Luther corp. She picks up Baudrillard's ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ instead and opens it. The book has been hollowed out, and inside there are several flash drives. She takes the red one.

Opening the door, she hands it to Nate who grins so wide he looks like a Cheshire cat.

“Oh Halleluia! Thanks man, you’re a real lifesaver.”

Felicity doesn’t bat an eye. “If you get caught using that-” she cautions.

Nate swats a hand in the air. “I know, I know. This never happened. You don’t exist.”

Felicity blinks, the hollowing pit at the base of her stomach opening up again, that feeling of unrealness coming back.

“Right.” She says slowly, looking back at her computer.

“You alright, hon?” Nate’s friend asks her, throwing her shiny black ponytail over her shoulder. Felicity feels a sting of shame for not even remembering her name. “You look a little… paler than usual.”

Felicity shakes her head, unsure of how to even begin explaining what she feels.

“Do you ever have the feeling that you’re not sure if you’re awake of dreaming?”

The other woman smiles. “All the time. It’s called mescaline sweetheart. Only way to fly.” She laughs and links her arm around Nate’s middle, leaning into him.

“Sounds to me like you just need to unplug for a while, babe.” She adds. She winks at Nate and then looks back at Felicity, who is now shifting on her feet. “Wanna join us?”

“Yeah sure, come on.” Nate urges.

Felicity shakes her head. “I can’t, I have work tomorrow.”

The other woman laughs and leans her shoulder further into Nate, while somehow making it look like she would love to snuggle into Felicity as she does it. “Come on, it’ll be fun, I promise.”

Felicity is just about to say no, when he notices on the other woman’s black jacket, among a dozen other symbols, a small white rabbit.

She feels the floor beneath her feet tilt.

“Sure,” she hears herself say. “I’ll go.”

The apartment they end up at is even older than Felicity’s. A series of halls connects a chain of small high-ceilinged rooms lined with heavy casements. Smoke hangs like a veil, blurring the few lights there are as the industrial music blasts through the walls, making them vibrate. There are people everywhere, dressed mostly in blacks and leathers, gathered in cliques around pieces of furniture like jungle cats around trees. In the nearest room, shadow-like figures grind against each other to the pneumatic beat of the music.

She used to love places like this not even that long ago. She used to love parties like this, even though most of the time she was too young be let in. Mot that anyone cared or asked for ID in these places. And anyway, she never went alone, because she wasn’t stupid. Cooper was always with her.

Even a year after his suicide, the thought of him still makes her cringe, so Felicity takes another sip from her beer and leans further against the wall, wishing she could just melt into it. This might have felt right at home once, and she still might have the clothes, hair and makeup to fit right in, but she feels more out of place than ever.

 _‘As futile as everything else I do every day’_ she thinks bitterly

She trashes her beer bottle and is just about to leave when she notices someone staring at her from the corner of the room. Instantly she is on alert. Her fingers skim the bottle of pepper spray that she has always with her in her pocket.

He heads straight for her and Felicity straightens ready to bolt. But when he comes close enough that a bead of light catches his face, she freezes on the spot, as if her feet were suddenly stuck in lead.

He’s tall and broad, even though he’s holding himself in such a way as to make himself smaller.

_Fat chance of that._

And he has a fucking impossible face. Not because it’s pretty.

But because its Oliver fucking Queen.

“Hello Felicity.” He says, lips tilting up just barely. “Or do you like Overwatch better? Virus?” His smile widens a little like he gets the joke. “Oracle?”

It’s just because she’s so focused on his face that she can even make out the words he says. He looks amused and is still keeping a good distance between them, which is good because now she’s shaking a little.

She frowns. “How do you know those names?”

 _How are you alive_ would be a better question but the fact that he knows all her aliases freaks her out a little more.

“I know a lot about you, Felicity. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a while.”

Felicity shakes herself out of her stupor. “You’re… you’re Oliver Queen.”

His lips tick up again. “I am.”

“But… you’re dead.”

He takes a small step forward, showing her his hands the whole time. “I don’t feel dead, but you could ask someone else if they see me, to be sure.”

Makes sense that if she makes up a ghost he would be cheeky, but then again, why on earth Oliver Queen.

Felicity shakes her head, blinks furiously. He’s not a fucking ghost, he’s right there. “But… I mean, you drowned.”

“And yet, here I am.”

He’s so close now that she has to look up to really meet his eyes. She hasn’t forgotten the pepper spray bottle in her hand either – it’s out of her pocket now, but he’s moved so that he is leaning against the wall too and she has three directions in which to run if she so chooses.

All in all, three times out of five she’s been hit on by guys who are 100% creepier than he is trying so hard not to be, so she decides to give him another five seconds.

“Right. Here you are. What are you doing here?” And then she frowns even more deeply. “How are you even here? Does your family know you are alive? Why are you-”

“Felicity.” She jumps when she feels his hand on her arm. He moves his hand almost immediately after, but she does purse her lips shut. “I don’t have that much time.” He says by way of explanation.

“Still weird.”

His smile reaches his eyes and somehow softens the harsh lines of his face a little. “I know.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I know your name because you know mine.” He says and when she just frowns at him, he explains. “I’m the Arrow, sometimes.”

Felicity almost chokes on her spit.

“ _What_?”

He hushes her and steps just a little closer, leaning in so that he can talk without yelling. “Not so loud, please.”

She pulls back to look into his face, the half of it that is not shadowed.

“ _You’re_ the Arrow? _The_ Arrow? The one that crashed the NSA D–base?”

He nods, unaffected, as if it was a small thing. “It was a while ago, but yes.”

Her eyes widen with comprehension and somehow the questions keep piling up. That was not ‘a while ago’ though nice job with the vagary there, she thinks as she chews on the inside of her cheek. That was _three_ years ago. Two years after he supposedly died somewhere in the North China Sea.

She has one theory as to what happened to him, but she doesn’t dare hope. Or so she thinks, even as hope blooms inside her like a little bloody flower that pushes her to grab at him and shake him for answers.

And then she remembers something else and she swears under her breath.

“What is it?” he asks her.

Felicity links her arms over her chest. “I’ve had a bet going with myself for a while now that you would be a woman.”

He huffs a small laugh and looks down for a moment. “I’m flattered.”  

“Oliver Queen, a closeted nerd. Who knew? Not me. That was _you_ on my computer.”

“Yes.”

“You’re gonna have to tell me how you did that.” She narrows her eyes at him. “You hacked my system; it’s only polite that you tell me how.”

He smiles at her, tilting his head and for the first time Felicity remembers to breathe get out of the surreal feel of the moment to remember that he is actually very handsome.

“I think if we wanna talk we’ll have to go somewhere else.” She adds, leaning in just a little bit closer so that her words can be heard over the loud beat of the music.

But Oliver Queen shakes his head. “No, I can’t. It’s safer here and I don’t have a lot of time.”

“Right you said that. So, why did you want me to come here? I showed a lot of faith by coming here and not, you know, bolting, as a sane person would have when I saw some strange guy approaching me.”

“Yes, I’m sorry about that. I was hoping you’d be curious enough to hear me out.”

She rolls her eyes, though the cold press of dread at the base of her spine doesn’t really allow this to be funny anymore: she never could resist a mystery, and she has been feeling like she is on the edge of one for months and months. She needs an answer more than she needs her next breath at this point.

“I’m listening.” She says, serious now.

Oliver Queen leans in so close that he is practically talking in her ear.

“I brought you here because I needed to warn you.”

She pulls back to look at him. He is utterly serious.

“They’re watching you, Felicity.”

She frowns. “Who is?”

“Please, just listen. I know what you've been doing. I know why you hardly sleep, why you live alone and why, night after night, you sit at your computer. You're looking for him.”

Felicity’s palms start to sweat, her heart beating almost at the rhythm of the music. He’s standing so close that if she leaned in just a little bit more she would be able to touch him, but she’s frozen by what he’s saying.

_Spartan…_

“I know you are, because I was looking for the same thing. But when he found me he told me I wasn't really looking for him. I was looking for an answer.”

She looks at him in the eye then, scared and exited and almost too afraid to believe that this could be happening.

“It’s the question that drives us, it’s what brought you here. And you know it, just as I did.”

Felicity takes a deep breath and then lets it go slowly. “What is the matrix?”

She whispers it, afraid, even here, to say it too loudly.

“When I asked him, he said that no one could ever be told the answer to that question. They have to see it to believe it.”

Felicity’s breath shakes on the way out. “See what?”

Oliver leans close, his lips almost touching her ear. “The answer is out there, Felicity. It's looking for you and it will find you, if you want it to.”

He leans back and steps away from her, but she reaches for him with both hands. “No wait!”

To her surprise, he does.

“I need to meet him. _Please_. I need… I _have_ to know.”

With a kind of desperation that doesn’t make sense, that has no rhyme or reason. But she fully believes that she is in so deep in this maze that if she doesn’t find the center son she might really lose her mind, because nothing feels real anymore.

He squeezes her hand just once before letting it go. “You will. Soon.”

“That’s not an answer!” She insists, but he’s already turned away from her and she watches him melt into the shifting wall of bodies.

Felicity hisses a string of curses under her breath and hightails it out of there.


End file.
